Question of the week:  A question I often have wondered and simply not got around to asking anchors around your San Francisco sessions.  While I don’t get to join many of the sessions, I want to ask how you manage for so many individual types of athletes within a squad environment.  Can you coach to Olympic distance in the same lens as IRONMAN?

A good question -- and the answer in short is absolutely.  Similar to other squads, while the word 'specificity' is important in performance progression, this doesn’t mean that every single athlete requires a single session built just for them to facilitate the premise behind the word.  When we think about the in-person SF Squad environment we take three predominant missions:

1. Athlete development over the course of a year.

2. Enable athletes to be hitting the prime part of the racing season equipped to perform well.

3. Specific race rehearsal that exists beyond the group squad sessions (example:  A Saturday bike session and run off)

Within the SF Squad we could identify profiles of athletes:

1. Elite Age Group and Pros:  We have some very good athletes.  Very good.  Training and racing at a very high level.

2. Amateur Triathletes across all distances:  From podium to journey(wo)men who love the sport.

3. Aspirational Finishers:  Athletes aiming to train to get across the finish line of their first race or distance of a race.

4. Fitness Enthusiasts:  Those who are highly committed to life performance and fitness, but don’t actually compete.

5. Maturing Athletes:  Athletes training at all levels who -- I assume -- are card carrying members of AARP!

As you can see, it is a broad range.  But the common thread is that all of the athletes are following along sessions that progress over the phases of the season.  So they are all on a program that is structured and progressive.  It isn’t random, or a la carte, but facilitates development over the phases of the season.

I think it is also important to realize that the actual experience of the workout is often going to be different for the different populations -- and years of experience has shown me how to write workouts that push the more elite well, but also provide an opportunity for newer athletes to gain benefits.  Let’s give you an example:

Swim:  16 x 100 at a very strong effort with 20 sec rest.

If I provide this session to my more elite swimmers it is going to be an extreme challenge.  Essentially this is a broken up 1600 time trial at a very high percentage of their maximal speed. If I am pushing, they will not speak to me for the rest of the day from the effort because of disgust at my prescription, but also fatigue!

If I provide exactly the same session to a newer swimmer, the stress will not be same.  They simply don’t have the cardiovascular conditioning, muscular endurance, or neurological conditioning to operate at as high of a percentage of maximal speed for that duration.  It won’t make the session easier, but they won’t be able to operate at that same physiological stress. Management without actually doing anything -- except leaning on experience.

This concept comes into real life application.  If we consider race effort for a pro, we might expect an IRONMAN 70.3 effort to be at threshold (or about 90%), but a newbie will likely operate closer to an endurance effort (70%).

All this adds up to the fact that for 95% of the athletes, 95% of the time, the central Squad workouts cover all the bases and ensure readiness.  Occasionally, we need an athlete to add a little more, hit a little higher intensity, or scale back duration or intensity. Easy to do! No shame, no harm, and not a reason for exclusion.  They are still welcome and can manage within a session.

Of course the occasional little personal ramp into racing is nice, but we next to never extract an SF athlete from the squad sessions globally.  As you are training at home, it is fine to divert and add some builds into specific races, but my personal take is the more we keep the groups together in the base squad sessions, the better collective performance bubbles out of it.

I hope that provides context.

Cheers, 

Matt