Swimming water quality issues have been a recurring theme over the last couple of years, so now seems like a good time to go over some basics to help you be more aware of what you’re jumping into when starting a race. When it comes to triathlon open water swim quality, there are two basic areas to cover:

1) What’s in the water?
2) How do race organizations respond to what’s in the water?

So first, let’s go over the major players in terms of water quality for open water swimming:

E. coli
Bacteria. It will give you diarrhea. Or a UTI if you’re really unlucky.

Heavy metals
Usually thinking about things like mercury and lead. Obviously not “good” to swim in, but unless you’re swimming in a literal pool of mercury, a one-time exposure isn’t gonna do anything to you.

Chemical waste
Also obviously not “good” to swim in, but unless you’re swimming in a body of water contaminated by a known industrial polluter (a famous example is General Electric dumping PCBs into the Housatonic River in Pittsfield, MA), it’s not a scenario you have to think about all that much.

Oil
It’s obvious if you’re swimming in a body of water that recently had an oil spill. And only a psycho of a race director would hold a swim in water with an oil slick on top of it.

Debris
Large debris won’t give you any illnesses, but obviously isn’t fun to swim through. I’d expect any race to do a sweep for debris before the race.

Particulate matter
By “particulate matter”, I mean dirt and decomposed plant matter kicked up from the bottom of a river or lake. This is fairly common in triathlons and isn’t a health issue. It just makes visibility poor which can be annoying.

Fecal Coliform
Bacteria. It may not do much to you in and of itself, but it can be used as an indicator for the presence of other bacteria that will give you diarrhea.

Enterococcus
Bacteria. It can give you UTIs, meningitis, and diarrhea. Usually not a huge concern in and of itself, but like fecal coliform, it is often measured to act as an indicator of the presence of other bacteria that will…. give you diarrhea.

Red Tide Algal bloom3
Huge bloom of ocean algae. Usually dinoflagellates. Can happen on any coast, but most common on the Gulf coast. Most algae won’t do anything to you, but some release toxins that you’d rather not swim through. They’re most likely to give you a small rash or diarrhea.

Cyanobacteria
Bacteria. They’re the first organism on earth to produce oxygen, so they’re pretty great! But if you swim through a dense patch of them, they’ll give you…you guessed it, diarrhea.

For freshwater races, water quality will often decrease markedly after heavy rainfall, especially if the water is near agricultural land. But one positive on bacterial exposure is that the diarrhea won’t hit you until you’re done racing. So you got that going for you! (note: while these little bugs can cause more than GI distress and diarrhea, those are by far the most common effects)

Now, how do race organizations respond to all of those nasty things that can end up in the water?

Ironman

Based on decision making processes used in prior events, it appears that Ironman defers to state and local authorities when determining water quality safety for events4. For reference: when setting water quality standards, states must set their limits to be at least as stringent as the EPA regulations. EPA guidance on the main bacterial offenders is shown below.

EPA’s recreational water quality criteria cover many more pollutants, but I’m guessing you don’t care that much and also don’t have 7 hours to read all of them.

World Triathlon

This is obviously more critical in 2024, given all the publicity surrounding the water quality of the Seine.

In 2010, World Triathlon adopted the EEC standards 2006/7/EC for bathing water quality, and ruled that swims should only be held in bodies of water deemed to be in the “excellent” category.

World Triathlon requires that venues measure and submit water quality testing data at least 4 times:
-when the venue site is announced (if this takes place at least 15 months before the first competition date)
– 12 months before the event
– Two months before the event 6
– 7 days before the competition.

More testing may be required if there are specific concerns for a body of water.

The exact WT standards are as follows:

Sea and Brackish waters (brackish waters are waters at the transition from fresh water to salt water)
– pH between 6 – 9
– Enterococci must be <100 cfu / 100 ml
– E. Coli must be <250 cfu / 100 ml
– Any visible amount of Red Tide Algal bloom is grounds for cancellation

Inland waters (lakes and rivers)
– pH between 6 – 9
– Enterococci must be <200 cfu / 100 ml
– E. Coli must be <500 cfu / 100 ml
– Blue-Green Algal blooms/scum (cyanobacteria) must be <100 cells/ml

However, there is some discretion involved. The WT Medical Committee may grant waivers if one of the above standards is violated but they deem the violation to not be a significant safety hazard.

The post What’s in the Water You Swim In? first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Old-timey medical researchers got a lot wrong. They also got a lot right. And in 1916, Frederic Lee and Ernest Scott started off a paper with the sentence, “It is a fact of common experience that a human being in a hot and humid atmosphere feels a disinclination to perform muscular work.” I’m guessing something similar has entered your brain at mile 17 of an Ironman marathon.

I’m not exactly discovering general relativity here. Obviously racing in heat and/or humidity slows you down. We all know that. But what is really going on in our bodies, and how do we mitigate its effects on race day? Well now, that’s where things get interesting.

When we’re exercising, our bodies produce heat. The warmer our environment gets, alongside a continuous increase in the intensity and/or duration of exercise, the slower we shed heat. Heat accumulates in our bodies and body core temperature continues to rise at a rapid rate. Humid environments are also a problem due to one of our body’s main cooling mechanisms: sweating. The idea is that a little bit of heat from our body is required to turn sweat drops into water vapor, and so that heat leaves our body when our sweat evaporates. This is great in less humid environments where water evaporates more readily. However, in a humid environment where the air is already saturated with water, there’s nowhere for our sweat to evaporate to, so it sticks to our body and doesn’t serve a meaningful cooling function. Your body keeps producing sweat to try to cool itself down, but all it ends up really doing is dehydrating itself. Beyond dehydration, this is a problem because our bodies like operating in a narrow internal core temperature band.

When we leave that narrow band, enzymes stop working properly, intracellular reaction rates change, and all sorts of bad things happen that aren’t necessarily compatible with peak performance (or “living”). Additionally, muscle glycogen depletion speeds up in hot conditions, which is a problem because oxidation of carbohydrates in the gut slows down in hot conditions, so it gets harder to replace what your muscles are burning.¹ And then you end up curled up in a ball on the side of the road. Bottom line- when you are performing intense exercise in the heat the available fluid in your body must be shared by the muscle (to maintain performance), the heart (to maintain blood pressure and stroke volume) and the skin (to cool you down). When you are dehydrated this stresses the system even further.

Now, what temperatures are most relevant to us on race day? Core temperature. When I talk about “core temperature,” I’m referring to internal temp of your abdominal and thoracic cavities (i.e. your belly and chest). There are several modalities at your disposal for managing body temperature, and it’s up to you to practice them and have them in your toolkit on race day. Your main options for reducing core temperature in real-time are to slow down, move into less extreme environmental conditions (ex. shade), take in fluids (ideally supplemented with electrolytes), and/or reduce skin temperature.

As it turns out, the gradient between skin temp and core temp is one of the most important factors in determining performance losses due to heat. This is due to the way your body tries to shed heat. When you start overheating, arteries in your skin dilate to encourage blood flow. This is based on the idea that blood will get cooled when it travels to your skin, and as long as you have sweat evaporating and/or the external air temp is well below your body temp, then this works pretty well. A big problem for racing is that more blood going to your skin means less blood going to your muscles, which means reduced performance. So, if you can get your skin cooler, then not as much blood has to go there to get sufficient cooling power for your core. Your temps stay down, and more blood goes to your muscles. Pretty simple concept, right? However, having the means to do this during a long race is another matter.

To stay in that narrow core temperature band, we do things like shivering, sweating, dilating arteries in some areas and constricting arteries in other areas, etc… However, when you’re racing in 85-degree air with 80% humidity, those internal thermoregulatory tools often aren’t adequate and something’s gotta give – and usually, it’s your performance. The good news is that we can improve those internal thermoregulatory devices via training and intentional practice. We also have behavioral options available, such as clothing, pacing, fluids, etc.

The physiological changes we can use to our benefit are going to be gained during daily life and race preparation in extreme environmental conditions – whether through exercise or at rest, but you will trigger the most effective adaptations during exercise in hot and humid conditions that gradually progresses in exposure.¹ Post-exercise heat immersion in a sauna for 30-40 minutes can also be quite effective.¹ Heat adaptations appear to benefit performance in all environmental conditions¹, and if you can’t get the benefits of living at altitude, then the benefits of doing focused heat work are a pretty decent consolation prize. This figure summarizes a typical timeline for the various adaptations associated with heat adaptation.

Very important note here: I am NOT giving any sort of recommendation to do “dehydration training.” There are no adaptation benefits to dehydrating yourself during heat work, and all you’ll really be doing is putting yourself at risk of serious injury and/or death. This is part of the reason I have all of my athletes practice their race fueling plan on any sessions longer than 45-ish minutes. Not only do I want to make sure the session isn’t nutritionally compromised, I want to burn the fueling plan in their skull and I also want them to learn how to make adjustments on the fly to account for environmental conditions. So if you are doing any heat exposure work, be absolutely certain to drink more fluids than usual, consider adding an electrolyte mix to your drink, and be prepared to slow down or pull the plug on your workout if sense things are going sideways. Getting stronger and performing well in the heat is good. Exertional heat stroke is bad. Death is worse. Don’t be an idiot.

Heat training also requires a good amount of self-confidence and not caring what your numbers look like. I say this because Strava is a thing, and people like to have impressive looking pace/speed numbers on Strava so they can get more likes (semi-related note: social media is a wonderful tool for making people neurotic). So you need to have the self-confidence to go out and do heat work, and accept that your workouts are going to look “slow.” You have to be able to ask yourself this: “am I training to be strong and fast on race day? Or am I training to get Strava KOMs and convince my 84 Strava followers that I’m fast?” If you’re like me, it’s the former.

I think you’ll find a hundred different protocols for heat work, and I’m not here to go through all of them. They all boil down to basically the same thing: get out and train in heat stress conditions 4-6 days per week, and you should be pretty well adapted after 2-3 weeks. After you achieve adaptations, you’ll lose them at a rate of about 2-5% per day for every day you’re not exposing yourself to heat stress.¹ My basic strategy is to do my runs outside at the hottest time of day possible and do my bike rides on a trainer with a shirt on and the fan on low. I’m sure it’s not perfect, but it seems to get the job done. If you can’t get out at the hottest time of day, then just wear a little extra clothing. Here are the general guidelines I use for heat-specific work:

-if it’s above 80 deg, just wear whatever you want
-if it’s 70-80 deg, wear a thin long sleeve shirt and gloves
-if it’s 60-70 deg, wear a thicker long sleeve shirt, gloves, and a thin wool hat
-if it’s 50-60 deg, wear tights, a thick long sleeve shirt (or a running jacket), gloves, and a thin wool hat
-if it’s below 50, then bundle up, baby!

And in all of those situations, I’m drinking extra fluids.

Also, as an additional note, being tanned for race day is not going to help you resist the heat impacts of solar radiation. All it will do is reduce the amount of sunblock you need to apply (note: sun block does not mitigate the effects of heating from solar radiation, either). And no, skin color doesn’t have much impact on the warming effects of solar radiation, either.²

Ok, so we’ve covered physiological adaptations for dealing with heat. But what about race day? As you can probably guess, the basic behavioral choices you can make on race day should be focused on cooling the skin. Methods of cooling your skin are as follows: keep the sun off of it, put cold things on it, and allow it to sweat. Solar radiation is funny: it doesn’t increase the air temperature, but it heats you up when it hits your skin. Want proof of this? Go out on a sunny day and stand under the sun. Then go stand in the shade. The air temperature in the two places is exactly the same, but one feels much cooler than the other.

Keeping the sun off it is simple enough: just wear clothing that covers your body. Oddly enough, the color of the clothing only makes a small difference, but the reflectivity of the fabric does make a big difference.¹ But wait a minute… if you wear clothing, then that can trap warm air and/or impair heat loss from sweating by retaining fluid. Dangit! Much as your body is forced into a competition of diverting blood to muscles or blood to skin, your brain is confronted with a dilemma – do I want to keep solar radiation off my skin or do I want to maximize heat loss via sweating? The Bedouins in the Sahara desert have a nice solution to this, in that they wear flowing robes that both keep the sun off and allow airflow against the skin. Unfortunately for us, those robes are an aerodynamic disaster on the bike and would lead to horrible chafing when they stick to your sweaty skin during the run. So “loose flowing robes” are out for Kona, but we are getting somewhere.

What I’ve found to work well for me is a very thin, white, long-sleeve top with some reflective fibers in it and a tiny bit of ventilation. I’ve always raced well in the heat (save for IM Coeur d’Alene 2015 and Challenge Aruba 2017, but hey, nobody’s perfect, right?), and the top I’ve found best for this is the Skins A200. (Note: Skins was my apparel sponsor for a few years, and that’s when I fell in love with their products. That said, I’m sure there are several other companies out there making comparable products.) Here’s what you get with a top of that style: 1) white, reflective, fibers are good at repelling solar radiation; 2) it’s very thin so it doesn’t retain much fluid and you still get evaporative cooling from sweat; 3) it’s very tight so it can hold ice from aid stations against your body. I think you can achieve similar results by wearing a traditional tri top (short-sleeve or sleeveless) and white arm sleeves.

Important note: the efficacy of this clothing is greatly enhanced by keeping it wet and/or full of ice, so get greedy with the ice and water at aid stations! I’ve also had good luck with tube socks around my neck. It actually works quite well: leave T2 with a long tube sock and fill it with ice at the first aid station you see. Then tie a knot in one end and drape it around your neck. After it melts, fill it again with ice at another aid station. This is particularly effective because you’re putting ice right next to your carotid arteries and jugular veins, and so a lot of blood is getting cooled down very rapidly on its journey to/from your core. It can also be effective to get ice down your shorts and have it against your femoral arteries, but it’s much harder to keep the ice in place down there.

Other behavioral choices you can make on race day include wide brimmed hats, chewing on ice at aid stations, and just remembering to drink enough fluids. I’ve always raced by what I call “the golden rule”: the goal is to pee at least once every 56 miles on the bike. It’s obviously not a perfect rule, but as a rough guideline to make sure you’re hydrated out on course, it’s pretty useful.

While we’re talking about race day, it’s also useful to touch on cardiovascular drift. I’m sure you’ve all noticed it: while you’re on a long workout and holding a steady effort level, your HR slowly drifts upward. So what’s going on? There are a couple of theories, but a common theme is decreased stroke volume (i.e. the amount of blood your heart ejects with each beat).³ Higher degrees of cardiac drift are associated with a temporary drop in VO2 max and cardiac drift is more pronounced in hot environments.³ The beauty of it is that we can use cardiac drift on race day as a key for telling us how we’re managing pacing and hydration. If you see a very slow/steady amount of cardiac drift, you’re probably doing pretty well at managing the day. If you see a sharp increase in cardiac drift (or “heart rate decoupling” as it’s often called), then that’s a big red flag that you’re dehydrated and overheating. So while racing, you should always be looking at both pace and HR, and you should be aware of the relationship they have with each other early in the run. As the run progresses, keep an eye on how HR and pace are changing. If you see that HR climb at an increased rate at a given pace, you’d better slow down and get some fluids in ASAP, and then wait for your HR to get back under control, or else you could end up curled up in a ball on the side of the road.

At the end of the day, racing well in the heat is all about two opposite things: making yourself uncomfortable by exposing yourself to heat stress during training, and then doing everything possible to minimize heat stress on race day. Master those two arts, and you’ll have a nice leg up on the competition next time you race somewhere that humans probably shouldn’t be racing.

References
1) Periard, J.D; Eijsvogels, T.M.H; Daanen, H.A.M. Exercise Under Heat Stress: Thermoregulation, Hydration, Performance Implications, and Mitigation Strategies. Physiological Reviews, Apr 2021. Vol 101, pp 1873 – 1979

2) Walsberg GE. Consequences of skin color and fur properties for solar heat gain and ultraviolet irradiance in two mammals. J Comp Physiol B. 1988;158(2):213-21. doi: 10.1007/BF01075835. PMID: 3170827.

3) Wingo, Jonathan E.1; Ganio, Matthew S.2; Cureton, Kirk J.3. Cardiovascular Drift During Heat Stress: Implications for Exercise Prescription. Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews 40(2):p 88-94, April 2012. | DOI: 10.1097/JES.0b013e31824c43af

4) Otani, H., Kaya, M., Tamaki, A. et al. Effects of solar radiation on endurance exercise capacity in a hot environment. Eur J Appl Physiol 116, 769–779 (2016)

The post Training, Adapting, and Racing in Heat first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Disclaimer: I am a coach for QT2 Systems, and while Wahoo SYSTM not the same type of coaching product that we offer, there is a small amount of overlap. I have done my best to take off my QT2-colored lenses and evaluate SYSTM objectively.

So the first question… what is Wahoo SYSTM? Some kind of new trainer? No, no it isn’t. It’s Wahoo’s entry into the coaching/scheduling/motivation space, and it’s delivered via an app that can be downloaded to any PC/tablet/phone. Big picture, it plans workouts for you, and then delivers them in a video format that’s become popular with many home fitness products. The above is a view as to what you’d see on your screen during a typical workout:

–Target HR and Actual HR
–Target Power and Actual Power
–Target Cadence and Actual Cadence
–Target Perceived Exertion

Then they layer these metrics over a video of people cycling (or a bike race), and you’ve got yourself a fairly immersive workout experience.

So that’s all well and great, but what is it like to actually use? I hopped on it for a few weeks to find out, and I’ll walk you through my experience.

Download, Installation and Initial Set-up

Downloading was incredibly easy across all of my devices: an Android Tablet, a Windows PC, and an iPhone. Total time for all three was probably less than a minute.

Once inside SYSTM, you have a relatively unexciting account creation experience. Just enter your basic details — height, weight, recent training experience, how much time you have to train, and what your target event is. I have 1.5 jobs, a family, and a psychotic dog, so I chose “3-6 hours training per week”, with “sprint duathlon” as my goal race. Next thing I knew, there was a calendar page with all of my planned training posted for the next few months.

Part of the initial setup was an FTP and MAP test. This was going to be my first chance to really evaluate the accuracy/engineering behind SYSTM. So I hopped on my trainer (Wahoo KICKR Snap), put it in ERG mode, and let SYSTM take control.
SYSTM took me through a warmup and then a fairly standard ramp test protocol. At the end of it, it said my FTP was 310 W and MAP was 388 W — numbers that are about what I’d expect. I’ll give the engineering/accuracy rating a 10/10 here.

The Training Schedules

The training itself was pretty simple (not easy… but simple). You just wake up in the morning, see what’s on the schedule, and execute it. For runs and swims, there is no connectivity with the app. So you take the instructions from the app and go do the workout on your own. For strength/yoga sessions (which I was happy to see were included), you hit “play” on the workout and then follow along with a pre-recorded video of an instructor.

The bike training is where SYSTM gets interesting and impressive. When you start the app and open a workout, the Bluetooth sync between with your devices is quick and seamless. After that, you just get rolling. There are options to have the background video on or off, and while I generally chose to have the video off because sometimes it felt a little bit silly to try to pretend I was in some grand bike race while riding in a cramped 12’ x 7’ room, I’ll admit that that background video did help as motivation on some of the harder sessions.

And, fair warning on those harder sessions: SYSTM does not back off on the harder sessions… woof! All of the workouts are based on a percentage of your calculated FTP, and when you’re in ERG mode, you have no choice but to hit the numbers. This isn't like Zwift, where you can turn ERG mode on and off, or adjust the bias midway through. There are no 2 ways about it: some of the sessions are extremely tough, to the point where I failed on a couple before completing the planned workouts. As an aside: I personally dislike ERG mode because it’s easy to get caught in the "low cadence death spiral”, but that’s a personal thing and not a shortcoming of Systm). As a long course triathlete, it’s no surprise that I struggled most on the workouts that were extended threshold intervals with periodic sprints sprinkled in.

Overall the training had more intensity/threshold work than I’m used to, but that should probably be expected given that I told the program I only had 3-6 hours per week for training. With volumes that low, if you’re not doing a high proportion of your training at high intensity, you’re just not going to make very many gains. For the sake of curiosity, I also punched in some other goals (70.3 race distance, with 10-12 hours per week to train) to see what kind of training was prescribed. While I didn’t love the progression I saw laid out on the calendar as it seemed to ramp up run volume a bit too quickly, overall it seemed fine as a general roadmap that an athlete could tweak as necessary.

Final Thoughts

I have tremendous respect for the engineering and thought that went into designing SYSTM. Wahoo’s product design and engineering have impressed me ever since I first bought one of their trainers in 2013. The seamless integration of the SYSTM App with my KICK was great, as I didn’t have to think about anything during the workout except turning over the pedals. While I didn’t love the overall training structures offered, I do think SYSTM is pretty good as a tool to use for individual workouts. It’s not as good as an individual coach, but it’s also not trying to be an individual coach.

Bottom-line: if you want some sort of structure to keep you on a track and hold you accountable, then I think SYSTM is a great deal at $15/month.

The post Wahoo SYSTM: A Second Look first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Love it or hate it, technology is inherently a part of triathlon. In this month’s exploration of triathlon related "hacks," we look at a couple of recent technologies that have been adopted by many athletes but leave even more athletes saying “I have no idea what that is.”

Carbon Plated Running Shoes

If you follow pro racing at all, you may have noticed that the running times have improved markedly in the last few years. In 2009, people’s heads exploded when Matt Reed ran a 1:11 at Oceanside. Sub-1:15 runs off the bike were fairly rare, let alone a 1:11. Now it seems like sub-1:15 is routine, and you have to flirt with 1:11 just to make a men’s podium.

So what the heck is going on? Is it drugs? Unlikely – we’d see similar leaps in swim and bike times. And while I’d be a fool to think that no one is doping, I also refuse to believe that suddenly everyone started doping 3 years ago. (I started doing a deep dive into comparing splits among the three disciplines over the last 10 years, but quickly gave up on that idea when I considered the scope of data necessary to come to statistically significant conclusions. And then how do I account for improvements in bike tech? It was starting to feel like a statistics term paper).

Is it improvements in training technique or nutrition? No, sorry. Running is running and food is food. Maybe you can find 0.5% improvements over several years by tweaking those variables. And more often than not, revolutionary new training and nutrition techniques is a euphemism for we came up with a new doping regimen that the testers can’t detect yet.

Is it “the power of belief”? Yes, that probably plays some role. The classic example of this is the 4-minute mile barrier. Nobody could run a sub-4 mile and a lot of smart people thought it may be impossible. Then Roger Bannister did it, and suddenly every elite middle-distance runner could do it. Heck, a high school runner even went sub-4 within a decade of Bannister’s feat. Belief that you can get through the pain and actually achieve something is much stronger after you see someone else do it. The task goes from “impossible” to “possible,” and this absolutely matters in endurance sport.

Is it the shoes? Nike claimed a 4% performance improvement with their carbon plated shoes, but of course they did, right? They’re trying to make money, so they’ll pay a lab to write a paper with the exact conclusions that help them make money.

But just because they’re trying to make money doesn’t mean they’re wrong, it just means their claims should be viewed with a bit of skepticism. Given that drastically new shoe technology came out at the same time as run times improved sharply, and that every significant men’s and women’s running world record 5km and longer has been broken since carbon plate running shoes were introduced, Nike’s claims sure seem plausible (Pardos, et al, 2021). The idea behind these shoes is that the stiff carbon plate acts to roll the foot forward through ground contact, keeps the toes straight at push-off, and has more of an energy-storing “spring effect” than traditional running shoes (Pardos, et al, 2021).

This relatively well-known articledoes not appear to have any authors with significant ties to major shoe companies, so I’m inclined to trust its conclusions. Cliff’s notes: it comes to the same conclusion as Mars Blackmon: “It’s gotta be the shoes.”

Just about every major player in the distance running game has a carbon model out now (Asics, New Balance, Nike, Hoka, Adidas, Saucony, Brooks, On), and there are surely minor performance differences between the brands and models. But I’m not digging that deep, since those benefits are going to vary based on how each shoe feels to an individual and how its specific carbon plate interacts with that person’s stride. I can tell you that I have a pair of Saucony Endorphin Pro 2’s (as does one of my athletes), and my anecdotal conclusion is that they are magical. I’m not going to say which brand is “best”, because I do believe it’s individual. But I do feel comfortable saying that if you’re not in carbon plated running shoes on race day, you’re putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage.

Reference: Muniz-Pardos, B., Sutehall, S., Angeloudis, K. et al. Recent Improvements in Marathon Run Times Are Likely Technological, Not Physiological. Sports Med 51, 371–378 (2021).

Heart Rate Variability

I’m sure you’ve seen people wearing Whoop straps and Oura rings, and you know that those wearables are telling people how rested their body is, tracking sleep, etc. But how do they work? They measure something called Heart Rate Variability (HRV), which measures the variation there is in the time between your heart beats. Yes, you read that correctly. Despite what you may think, your heart does not beat at perfectly regular intervals. However, the variations are so small (on the order of 0.1 seconds from one beat to the next) that we can’t detect those variations without fancy technology.

In general, more variability indicates a healthy and well-rested individual, less variability indicates fatigue or possible health issues. However, it’s important to remember that everyone has their own baseline, and so these devices measure your HRV against your own personal baseline, not necessarily against an arbitrary set point.

A few of my athletes use these devices, and I wore a Whoop strap for about 3 months back in 2018. Here’s my brief review:

Pros:
–The strap was incredibly accurate. When I felt tired, the Whoop app told me that I was tired and needed recovery. When I was peppy and ready to roll, sure enough, the Whoop app told me to go hard in training.

–The sleep-tracking feature is useful. It’s eye-opening (pun intended) to find out how different “time in bed” can be compared to “time actually spent sleeping.”

Cons:
–The need to recharge it every 1-2 days made me somewhat neurotic and it became a major nuisance. Whoop claims to have improved their battery life since 2018, however, so this may not be an issue anymore.

–In order for it to be most accurate, you have to wear it 24/7, which can be annoying.

–Starting at $30 per month, Whoop memberships don’t necessarily break the bank, but they are an expense you need to consider.

Overall:
I like my athletes using it because I can get sleep numbers auto-uploaded to TrainingPeaks. However, there is one significant drawback: it can mess with an athlete’s head. There are specific times in training when I want an athlete to be unusually worn out and want them to continue pushing hard anyways. This is not common, but it happens, particularly during the final weeks of an overload period before a taper starts. If they have a big workout on the schedule during a planned overload period, and an HRV device tells them they should be resting that day, it can have a real impact on their motivation to push through fatigue and complete the planned session. So, as a word of warning, if you’re a coach and you’re putting an athlete through a planned overload (with rest on the back end, of course!), it may be a good idea to encourage your athlete to ignore the HRV data for a few days.

Overall, I didn’t love the Whoop strap for myself and stopped using it. That’s not to say it’s a bad product. Rather, it’s an amazing piece of technology. It just wasn’t for me. I was tired and it told me I was tired. I felt great and it told me I should feel great. I don’t need to pay $30/month for a device to tell me what I’m already feeling. However, for a newer athlete who doesn’t have a developed sense of what their body is telling them, or someone who doesn’t quite have the discipline to hold back when their body is telling them to hold back (read: self-coached athletes), I can see HRV technology being extremely useful at telling you how to interpret what your body is telling you. Essentially, it can accelerate your learning curve for interpreting biofeedback. And if you make a concerted effort to learn from it, it can even make itself obsolete.

The post Debunking More Triathlon Hacks: Carbon Shoes and Heart Rate Variability first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Since this is my first article, I feel as if I should start with a description about my overall approach to training. I’ll get into more specific topics in subsequent articles.

Let’s cut right to the chase: Nobody has the one true exact right training style. If they claim to, they’re either ignorant, or marketers whose only goal is moving money from your bank account into theirs.

The truth is that there is no one right and correct way to train or race. There is essentially nothing in the way of legitimate peer-reviewed studies with large sample sizes on how best to prepare for and execute a triathlon. Yes, there are studies that can be applied to various aspects of triathlon (“dehydration is bad!”, “being aerodynamic on the bike is good!”), but nothing truly comprehensive that can tie everything together. As triathletes, we’re all kind of our own little science experiments, learning much of what we collectively know through iterative approaches.

This has led to a world where athletes have often won world titles with seemingly very different approaches, which is fine. The problem that arises is that many people then think the current world champion has figured out the secret workouts that make you a champion. You see this play out often on the forums on this very website. Someone will make a post about the training logs of a successful athlete, and then a bandwagon forms thinking it’s THE way to train.

The latest craze is over Gustav Iden and Molly Seidel and their relatively low-intensity run training. Now I have people texting me to ask if they should run slow all of the time. A few years ago, age groupers thought Sami Inkinen had the magic bullet because his volume was very low for Ironman (like 10 hours per week) but the intensity was HIGH, and I had people asking me if they should only do high-intensity work. A few years before that, everyone was agog with Brett Sutton having his stable of dominant female athletes do massive sessions like “go run a marathon on the track, alternating 400s at IM race pace and 400s at an easy jog.” (I don’t know if that was an actual session, but you believed me when I wrote it, right? Point made.)

So as the PETA-friendly version of the saying goes, there’s more than one way to peel a potato when it comes to training strategies. But, there is ONE common thread that connects every successful athlete in how they train and race: they achieve consistency in their training. Now, consistency is a funny and loaded term. It seems simple, right? I mean, sure, I guess it is simple if you want to look at it as a general concept, but it is extremely NOT easy to accomplish (“simple but not easy” is possibly the defining phrase of triathlon). Consistency requires finding a training schedule that has you training at least 4 days per week on a long-term basis; obviously pros and “Kona level amateurs” are going to be training 6-7 days per week, but they’re not the only ones who do this wonderful sport. You’re not achieving consistency if it’s a schedule you only stick to for a couple months. Consistency is only consistency if you can stick to it month after month, and year after year. So what are the key requirements of such a schedule?

-places sport-sport specific stress on your body and mind
-allows recovery time to adapt to the training stress
-allows enough time between sessions and incorporates the necessary blend of activities required to STAY HEALTHY (sleep, soft-tissue therapy, nutrition, mental breaks, etc…)
-does NOT interfere with life at a level that causes significant strain in an important relationship in your life (whether that’s with a spouse, child, significant other, parent, employer, etc…)

Now this is where things get interesting and I’m willing to engage in a meaningful discussion on how to approach training strategies. In an ideal situation, you put your body through as much training stress it can handle while not pushing those other areas (health, recovery, relationships) into dangerous territory.

Circling back to current cause célèbres, Iden and Seidel… is their low intensity focus a good idea? Sure, but if and only if you can stay healthy doing it AND have enough time that you can allot to it. If you can allot 20+ hours per week to low intensity training, then it can be extremely effective. But if you can only allot 9 hours per week to training, low intensity isn’t going to do a whole lot for you. I mean, it’ll be great for your health, but you’re not really going to see high performance on race day (which brings us to another topic for another day… performing at an elite level in triathlon is not a particularly “healthy” lifestyle by many measures.) If you only have 9 hours per week that you can consistently devote to training, then a high percentage of that had better be at tempo or harder intensity if you want to see any sort of results on race day.

So where does this lead us? It leads us to what the most important training metric is. It’s not volume or intensity, but rather stress, which is generally considered to be a combined metric that considers both volume and intensity. Jesse Kropelnicki used to describe it as “how much oxygen you’re passing through your system.” We never directly measured that, but the concept of it is useful. TrainingPeaks has managed to assign a numerical value to stress with their TSS, ATL, and CTL metrics. I don’t use those a ton, but that’s just personal preference. I don’t have anything inherently against them, I just gauge the stress on my athletes’ systems in other ways (ability to hit workout targets, HR lag on intensity changes, overall mood, and motivation levels being the primary things I look at). One of the ways we control for this at QT2 is that we increase training stress by increasing volume or intensity in a given week, but not both simultaneously (of course there are exceptions to this rule, but in general that’s how we operate).

How do we turn this into real-world practical advice? First, set your logistical constraints: figure out what you cannot compromise on. In my world, you cannot compromise on your job, your family, or your sleep. If I find out one of my athletes is only sleeping 6 hours per night, I will cut down their training as far as is necessary to allow them to get 7+ hours per night. I’ve done this countless times, and it’s created real tension with athletes who think I’m too much of a sleep dictator. Well… too bad, right? That’s just how important I think it is. And if you can’t organize your life so that you get at least 7 hours per night, then you’re not living in an environment where high-performance and long-term health are simultaneously achievable, and I don’t want to enable anyone going down that path. After that, figure out what you can compromise on sometimes, and what in your life you wouldn’t mind eliminating completely. Once that is done, we have an idea of what a realistic training volume is. Not necessarily the volume you should be doing right now, but what the ceiling is for your biggest weeks.

Once you have the volume that’s logistically achievable, then THAT’S when you start talking about intensity distributions. We’ll base target intensity distributions on what an athlete’s priority race for the year is, and what their limiters are for that specific race distance/terrain (really digging into the particulars of this could be an entire book, so I’m just gonna leave it there for now…).

So am I willing to talk to you about training strategies and intensity distributions? Sure. But you’d better enter the conversation knowing that it’s about a LOT more than just “I need to train short and hard!” or “I need to train long and slow!” Nothing you do in training matters even a little bit if you aren’t achieving consistency. The real conversation is “I have X amount of hours available. What is the most amount of training stress I can fit into that without risking consistency, or making compromises on health or other important areas of my life?” I’m not interested in chasing fads. I’m interested in keeping people grounded in the fundamentals and keeping them healthy, while also subjecting them to systematic increases in training stress. If you do that, the speed development will take care of itself. Everything else is just details.

Doug MacLean is a USAT Level 2 coach who has been working for QT2 Systems since 2010. In past lives, he was a D-1 college rower, a Surface Warfare Officer in the US Navy, and a professional triathlete for 8 years. He currently lives in Boston, MA with some humans and a Stage 5 Clinger wheaten terrier.

The post The Best Way to Train? It Depends. first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

This is the first in a mini-series on evaluating popular “hacks” in triathlon. First of all, I hate the word “hack.” My eyeroll alarm goes off every time I hear it. But some of the ideas behind “hacks” aren’t necessarily terrible and are worth serious evaluation. So I’ll use these articles to discuss if I think they’re actually good ideas, or if they deserve a thumbs down.

Low Carb Fueling

Disclaimer: There are dozens of articles that do deeper dives into this, and my goal here is not to uncover new evidence. I’m just giving my opinion on all of it, having read those articles on it and having had many conversations about it.

The latest diet craze in triathlon is “Low carb, high fat!” and “Ketosis!” They seem to be an offshoot of the larger “carbohydrates are the devil” fad that’s been sweeping across America for the last fifteen or so years. These dietary habits can work for daily living and even help with some specific medical conditions (such as epilepsy and diabetes). Some people have tried to extend those ideas over into triathlon. One of the driving forces is the mistaken belief that ingesting sugar during exercise spikes blood sugar and insulin levels, and leads to increased body fat.

This is false.

Any sugar you’re ingesting during intense exercise is quickly used as fuel, and doesn’t cause the associated blood sugar and insulin spikes seen from ingesting sugar while sedentary. Additionally, there’s the idea that if you go low/no carbohydrate, then you’ll need to carry less and the feeding process becomes more streamlined during training and racing. And yeah, this actually sounds kinda nice.

However, the point of fueling isn’t simply “what’s the smallest amount of fuel I can carry?” The point is “how can I get to the finish line fastest?” And for what it’s worth, between pockets, bento boxes, and on-course aid stations, having access to enough carbohydrate fuel should never be an issue for you in a triathlon unless you’re dazzlingly incompetent. (Editor’s Note: turns out I have a new line to add to my Twitter bio.)

So those are reasons it might not be helping you as much as you think, but what’s really going on here? The main issue with going low/no carbohydrate and relying on body fat stores is that fat takes longer for your body to metabolize than sugar, and so you get less energy per unit of time than from sugar metabolism. This is where we get into the world of sliding scales. As exercise intensity increases, your need for rapid fuel processing also increases. Energy metabolism from fat becomes self-limiting in a manner, because your ability to do work is limited by the rate that your body is able to provide energy to muscles. Essentially, fueling from fat lowers the ceiling on the intensity of work you can produce in racing events.

For low-intensity work (say hiking or slow jogging), then fat as your primary fuel is fine, because at these intensities, your body doesn’t need energy as rapidly. The problem here is that a well-executed triathlon is not a “low intensity” type of activity. Yes, even Ironman is relatively high intensity, especially as you get to elite competitive levels of the sport.

Now, that’s not to say you ONLY burn fat or ONLY burn sugar during an Ironman. It’s always going to be a blend of both, and then we have to ask ourselves “how do we want to push the balance one way or the other by adjusting our fueling?”

Proponents of low/no-carb fueling methods love to trot out lab testing results showing changes in fat metabolism during exercise over time after athletes engage in low/no carb diets. That’s certainly interesting, but I have to respond with 2 questions:

1.) What physical and mental damage was done to the athlete in the process of achieving this metabolic shift via starvation workouts? (I know of 2 pros whose careers were essentially ended by the stress of trying to force themselves through “starvation workouts” to alter their fat/carb energy profile)
2.) Can you show actual race performance improvement attributable to low/no carbohydrates during a race?

I’ll admit that despite many failures, there are a few athletes who have been fine with this approach, and there is some interesting research suggesting that low/no carbohydrate fueling could lead to minor performance improvements. But stepping back and looking from a bigger perspective, I don’t believe this approach is worth the risks and downsides that come along with it. A good way to think about aspects of performance is to think of them as “dials.” So ask yourself, have you already turned all of your other dials up to 11? Things like “durability”, “pacing strategy”, “tactical awareness in the water”, “body comp”, “bike position”, etc.

Unless your name is Jan Frodeno or Lucy Charles Barclay, the answer is likely “no.”

But if you somehow have ALL of your dials at 11, then yes, switching to a low/no carbohydrate fueling strategy may provide you with the most marginal of gains.
Stepping back even further: One of my guiding principles is “don’t let any workouts or races be compromised by nutrition.” Your workout is a small window of time where you get to stress your peripheral systems, and if you’re not giving your body the fuel it needs to achieve your workout targets, then you’re missing chances to stimulate adaptations. And then beyond that, I hope I don’t have to explain why it’s a bad idea to allow yourself to have nutritionally-limited races. You’ve put in a TON of work to get ready for race day. Don’t risk submarining your race with nutrition experiments that could backfire and cost you far more time than they could ever potentially save you.

Final ruling: Low/no-carb fueling may have marginal benefits in lower intensity-events, but decades of athletes trying different fueling plans, and basics of human energy metabolism, suggest that it’s likely not worth the risks associated with it.

Sleeved vs Sleeveless Wetsuits

Wetsuits undeniably make people faster swimmers. That is not debatable. However, things get interesting when you start talking about full-sleeve vs sleeveless. To frame our debate here, let’s talk about *why* wetsuits make you faster. First and foremost, they allow swimmers to passively have great body position in the water. There is no energy or skill required on the swimmer’s part: a wetsuit will prop their hips up to the water surface and give them a lovely and streamlined body position. This is the main source of speed gained from wearing a wetsuit (don’t believe me? slap on a pair of floaty pants for some pool workouts and see how dramatically your times improve just by having your hips swaddled in neoprene). Beyond body position, there’s also the fact that the outer coating used on wetsuits is more hydrodynamic than skin, so there’s less friction drag acting on your body. The outer material accounts for a 15-20% reduction in friction drag compared to skin. (Toussaint, et al, 1989).

For the sake of argument, let’s invent some numbers (these are obviously estimates, because it’s going to be different for each swimmer and each wetsuit, but for our purposes, these numbers are close enough). Let’s start with a swimmer who gains 7 seconds per 100 meters when wearing a wetsuit, which is a typical number. Let’s say 70% of those gains are from improved, passive, body position, and 30% is from reduced friction drag. So roughly 2 seconds per 100 is gained from the reduced friction drag, and maybe 1/6 of the material is on your arms (so 1/6 of that 2 seconds would be from the arm material). In real world terms, where does this put us? If a wetsuit is giving you 7 seconds per 100 meters, that means the material on the arms is responsible for maybe 0.3 seconds per 100 meters.

Is there a real, measurable, benefit gained by wearing sleeves? Absolutely. But the problem is that that argument is too narrow and ignores some important factors. The two other factors that MUST be considered are wetsuit fit and body temperature. First of all, fit is important. Every wetsuit manufacturer insists that they have a suit that fits you perfectly.

This is simply untrue.

Does every manufacturer have a suit that you can fit over your body and swim in? Yes. Does every manufacturer have a suit that you can fit over your body and swim comfortably in? No. Just the slightest bit of shoulder restriction, over 2.4 miles in the water, is going to gradually add up and increase your overall fatigue levels. And with body temperature regulation, everyone is going to have their different comfort levels, but if the water is above 67-ish degrees, I feel like a lobster boiling in a pot if I’m wearing a full sleeve. So do I gain 0.2 seconds per 100 from the sleeves? Sure. But then I lose 2 seconds per 100 from overheating in 71 degree water. That 0.2 seconds of gain from the sleeves isn’t looking so great anymore, is it?

So what’s the takeaway? Full-sleeved are faster in lab conditions and often also faster in real world conditions for many people, but not for everybody. If you’re super comfortable and not overheating in your full-sleeve, then go on with your bad self and keep using it. But if you feel *any* restriction, constriction, or overheating, don’t be afraid to switch to a sleeveless. Not only is sleeveless cheaper than full sleeve, it may actually be faster for you. Or, if you really want to get extreme with it, try this fun game: next time you race a sprint, just wear a swimskin and floaty pants. I’ve done it several times. It’s almost as fast as a full wetsuit in the water, and allows for ultra-fast transitions.

Final ruling: From a hydrodynamic standpoint, assuming perfect fit and water that’s an appropriate temperature, full-sleeve wetsuits are unequivocally faster. But the real world doesn’t always fit into those prerequisites, so sleeveless can be faster in real-world conditions for many people.

The post Evaluating Triathlon “Hacks” first appeared on Slowtwitch News.