To PTS Home >

Coach Olwen Huxley

“Going out too hard” is the shame-faced expression used when someone who should have known better absolutely wrecks their finishing race time by trying to beat other athletes at the wrong moment. It is generally used in conjunction with fishing for sympathy/admiration from fellow teammates/co-workers/potential mates etc. by explaining why it made sense at the time to post the fastest swim or bike split of the most recent race, even though it resulted in a mediocre overall placing and the guy whom they beat getting out of the water ultimately won his age group. You overhear this person at happy hour and think “weenie” but come on, now, you may be guilty, too.

There is another application of the term “going out too hard”, which applies to the season overall. I’ll discuss both of them in this article. More than occasionally, the two are connected, since the mentality (fear, mostly) that drives you to do it repeatedly on the macro level (training) will inevitably spill over into the micro level (racing).

Let’s look at racing first: Triathlon racing, even at the sprint distance, is a lot about patience and process, not beating people and getting a gold medal. Only the very best athletes are actively and productively thinking about beating people the entire race, and many at this level still don’t think race-y thoughts until they are getting down to the wire. I used to beat everyone on the swim, and assumed that a) swimming was upper body and didn’t impact the run and the bike b) I was just a bad runner and a so-so biker and that with lots of training, these other two sports would come along. I was horribly, horribly wrong. In the meantime, I crushed the swim and got crushed by the run at every single race.

It wasn’t until Patrick McCrann told me that I should try to come 10th in my age group on the swim at the Mountaineer ½ Iron a couple of years ago that I realized that the whole time my bike and run fitness were just fine, but my system was so messed up by the time I got out of the water that I never settled down, and by the time the run came around I was barely hanging on. I think a lot of people are doing this during their races, but know this: there is nothing more satisfying, or more educational, than running down the person who beat you by 5 minutes on the swim because you let them go.

It’s hard to take the swim easy, but if you are a strong swimmer and puzzled at why your athletic strength isn’t producing on the bike or the run during a race even though you KNOW you are putting in the miles, try (from your point of view) losing the swim for a change. If you are not a strong swimmer, the negative impact of the swim on the rest of your race may be even greater. If your race is a long one, like a ½ Iron, you want to consider losing to a few people on the bike, too. It makes a huge difference, even in an Ironman where the swim was hours ago (and so short relative to the other legs) and the bike always seems to be so important. Just FYI, hammering the bike will kill your run, so that also counts as “going out too hard”. Watch your heart-rate, and don’t chase people when they pass you.

Now for training: It’s March. It’s starting to warm up a tiny bit. You are going stir-crazy with indoor workouts, it feels like the racing season is just around the corner and you aren’t ready for Ironman Whatever 2007, which is the “A” race that you really care about. So what do you do? You take a token warm-up week of 8 hours or so, and then you put the hammer down. And you feel great: all those winter weight workouts are paying off, you are smoking your buddies on the rides and trail runs, and forget about the swim. Or maybe you don’t feel great: your body is sluggish (OK, you feel fat), you are getting dropped on the rides, your swim is clumsy, and the runs are death-marches from hell that you can’t wait to be done with. You are two weeks into the season and you are already frustrated.

But wait a second – doesn’t this sound like your races? The same patient approach applies in both situations to turn in some really solid times. Whether you feel terrible or not, you need to pull back, put things into perspective, and take it easy, because your race is actually months and months away and on your current trajectory you’ll be overtrained with bronchial pneumonia within a couple of weeks. As with your racing, don’t hit your training season with everything you’ve got right at the beginning, even if your first race is right around the corner. It’s usually not a good idea to think “I want to nail the first race of the year, which is in a month, so I’m going to train really hard for it.” Your body is willing to do pretty much anything you tell it to, but this is a dangerous thing: you can do a lot of damage by making those demands without a breaking-in period of at least 3-4 weeks or more of genuinely (i.e. annoyingly) moderate training. Don’t suddenly ramp up your training after these first four weeks, either. Add miles/minutes/intensity gently. Overtraining is like global warming – by the time you notice the effects, the damage is already done and remediation is going to be very costly.

Patience: It’s often boring, and you might have to let people drop you those first few weeks or even months on the rides, run on your own, and not let it get to you. But ultimately, as with the races themselves, it will pay off with a solid season and much, much less frustration.

Close Window