'World Championship' season is getting underway. Whether you're a short-course elite gunning for the Olympics, an age-grouper focused on qualifying for your national team at Worlds or punching a ticket for Kona, there are some key ingredients core to achieving success in triathlon and endurance sports at any level.

At Purple Patch Fitness, we talk frequently about the PATH to performance since achieving success in endurance sports is an evolutionary process arising from four key themes:

• Patience
• Progression
• Specificity
• Consistency

Patience & Progression
You may have heard of Malcolm Gladwell's rule of thumb that it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery in a given field. While it may not take you that long to qualify for Kona, for most people it takes TIME to develop the skills and endurance to race at a high level. The key is to have a training program with a foundation on athlete development so that race performances improve over time. That is why patience is so important. Rather than enter XYZ race in order to qualify, I like to see athletes embrace the journey and the process of improving as an athlete. The results usually take care of themselves.

Consistency
One of the magic words for improvement in endurance sports is consistency: The ability to train and compete day in, day out, week after week and across multiple seasons. If consistency is critical, there are three elements that need to be present to allow athletes to be able to train for long periods of time.

A training plan that can be integrated into life rather than squeezed on top of it! It is a long process to truly evolve, usually taking multiple seasons, so we must create sustainable training situation in order for the athlete to maintain passion and to avoid deep fatigue and injury.

Athletes must be patient and smart with the execution of the training plan. That means going easy on the easy days to allow a progression of load over the season and multiple seasons.

Besides 'life' and a smart 'training plan', athletes must also ensure that they build a foundation of health to allow for positive training adaptations. These supporting elements include sleep, fueling and daily nutrition.

Specificity
If we then layer on specific training to help you develop as an athlete as well to develop for the demands of your race, you will find that performance improves, racing times improve, and the RESULT can be a World Championship qualification.

For most athletes the path to performance takes time and the honest truth is that real performance is usually a multi-season process. If we use the example of qualifying for Ironman Hawaii (KQ), the first step is typically to just do an Ironman. The next step is to train to race an Ironman and only then evolving to the level to potentially KQ. This is true not only for amateurs but also for professional triathletes.

Case Study
Kevin Collington is a former Purple Patch Fitness professional athlete who had a background in Olympic distance and Half-ironman distance racing. In 2015, as a new athlete to Purple Patch albeit with a decade of training already under his belt, Collington did a fantastic job in training, was highly consistent and raced fairly well.

As we started to repeat the cycle in 2016, he developed a higher resilience and jumped to the next level of performance. Collington's racing jumped, but not from anything that he had done in 2016 but from the work completed in 2015 and repeated during the first half of 2016.

Collington embraced the journey, not overly focused on a single race for evaluation and measurement of success, but fallen in love with the training process that has allowed the results and wins to come.

Cheers,

Matt

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