In an article on the Training Peaks blog, Matt Fitzgerald describes how to nail the Ironman marathon:

“Get as strong as you can on the bike.”

I always read what Matt has to say, ‘cos it makes a lot of sense. I think he may have missed something here though, and only given us part of the story. Like so many things, there are a lot more parts to the puzzle than just the statement above. Here’s one…

In my experience, Ironman athletes who get stronger on the bike don’t necessarily run any faster, they simply put in a better bike split.

For me, the true secret to running an Ironman marathon near your ability lies not in how strong you are on the bike, but rather in how well you pace the bike leg of your Ironman in relation to that strength.

The triathlon world is littered with athletes who are very proud of their 5-hour Ironman bike splits, but who have never run anywhere near the 3:05 or so marathon that you should expect from someone who rides that fast. After all, surely more bike fitness should equal a faster run?

What you actually need to do is to work out from your training:

1. How fast can you ride 112 miles?
2. How fast should you ride 112 miles in your race?

The first is easy. There are a number of more involved methods I would use for my athletes, but a simple way to do this is to go out & ride a 112 miles as fast as you can on a course with a similar profile to your race. Do this 6-8 weeks or so out from your race. You might get a bit faster, but in this volume phase of your training, this gain will likely be minimal.

The second gets a bit more complicated though. I’m still working on the details, but from my coaching experience, I’ve noticed that most of the better marathon times have come off a bike split around 5% slower than the athlete’s actual ability over 112 miles. But of course, there are a lot of variables here too, not least, how well trained the athlete is for running a marathon & therefore how well they hold their technique when they’re tired.

Of course, knowing how fast you should ride is only part of the picture. You also need to make sure that you’re well enough trained as a runner that you can hold good form throughout the marathon. And you need to work out how fast you should be able to run so that you pace yourself well. But that’s another blog post…

Do you “just” ride your bike? Or do you “just” run? If you do either with no thought to your technique, you’re certainly among the majority.

Most of us in the triathlon world recognise very quickly that swimming is a very technique-dependent sport. And a whole industry has grown up with underwater cameras, endless pools, video analysis - the list goes on - to help us to improve our swimming technique.
[Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but that’s another post altogether.]

However much of what we do in our running & cycling training is far less focused on technique, working instead on getting as fit as possible. Unfortunately, the longer your training sessions, the worse this can be for your performance, simply because as you fatigue, your form (technique) starts to break down.

What many of us don’t realise is that regular training in a tired state simply reinforces poor technique, with the inevitable result that we often don’t get faster & sometimes even get slower! You see, no matter how hard you concentrate on having good technique early in a race, once you fatigue you will return to the form you have practised most regularly & most recently. That’s usually the “tired version” of your technique.

After all, what is technique, except the habits you have developed over time. And where do you develop them? You do so in your training. Habits are developed by repetition, so how much more powerful example of habit-forming behaviour can you have than any of your training sessions.

In an average 1-hour run, you will take around 10 000 steps, that’s 10 000 repetitions of the same behaviour! How long before that becomes ingrained? And annoyingly, it seems that your nervous system remembers the things you do most recently (late in a workout, when you’re tired) better than the early repetitions.

So what can you do in order to make sure that the habits you form in terms of your swim, bike & run technique will help, not hinder your race day performances?

• Focus on form in every single workout.
• Have a careful look at the volume in your training plan. Do you need it all? Do your sessions need to be that long? Do you think you’ll be able to complete each workout with good form?
• Check your form at various points during your workout. Are you able to hold the form you want? What nasty little habits do you have when you get tired?
• Have one technique point to focus on in every workout. No matter how long your session, regularly come back to this focus point.
• If you can’t hold your form in harder workouts, make the efforts shorter to the point that you can hold good technique and build from there. The most important time to have good technique is when you’re under pressure, almost anyone can hold good form at recovery pace if they choose to do so.

Remember, just as powerful as the habits that we form to get us out of bed, stop us eating chocolate or get us out training in the rain are the habits we form with every repetition of every movement in every workout.

And the really cool thing about this is that the extra speed is 100% free. Try getting a disc wheel, aero helmet or wind-tunnel session for nothing, you’ll be lucky!

We tend to think of habits from a negative standpoint, those little things we find ourselves doing seemingly without having made the conscious decision to do them - and in a nutshell, that’s the point: When we do something out of habit, we don’t consciously decide.

Instead, over a period of time, we have programmed our subconscious to perform the action more or less automatically. And this is where the power of habits lie for the endurance athlete.

In this post, a few examples of areas where developing good habits can be a very powerful force in improving your performances.

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to take a day off when you’re in the middle of a big block of training? Or conversely, how hard it is to start training again after a week or off at the end of the season? Both are simply the result of a habit you’ve developed.

Endurance sport is about consistency. As a result, the habit of training at least a little every day is a good one. Even a 20-minute run on a day when you have very limited time is useful in keeping your training moving forward.

[Whether it’s necessary to schedule complete days off is a whole other blog post. Suffice to say, I’m not a fan.]

By training daily, it will seem unusual to miss a session. And your performances will benefit.

It’s a powerful habit.

I wake up at 5am every day & an hour or so later, I head out to do my training. Yup, that’s 7 days a week. And as long as I stick to my wake-up time, it’s very easy to do. Do I feel sleepy in the morning? Yes. Are my legs a bit sore? Often, yes. Does the thought that another hour in bed would be nice ever cross my mind? Yes, almost every day.

But I still get up. And within 5 minutes or so, I’m wide awake & into my morning routine - most of which is in the dark, so as not to wake the family. The reason that developing this habit has been so important is that if I don’t train at 6am, I will often be unable to do so later in the day.

It’s a powerful habit.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook will know that I have trying to lose weight down to what I consider my ideal training weight. And I’ve been achieving the results I expected.

My wife will likely tell you that I have awesome willpower. But in reality, I simply harness the power of habit along with a vision of what I want that is more powerful than the desire for the foods that aren’t helpful to my goals.

The joke has long been that “It’s unfair, Will just cuts back on the dairy & the weight falls off him!”

There’s a bit more to it, but essentially, I very quickly put in place a habit where I eat similar things for most meals & snacks, spend a week convincing myself that chocolate & soft drinks have no place in my nutrition plan, and then let the power of my new habits take over.

It’s a powerful habit.

In part 2 I’ll be writing about the power of habit within your training sessions themselves…

On my Twitter feed recently, I mentioned my efforts to get down to my training weight & had a question from Mark (@SPARKSIE10).

He asked, “Hey Will, how have you determined your optimum weight? Experience? What’s your target body composition?

I thought this would be a good one to answer as a blog post, because a 140 character tweet will never explain my approach adequately.

Over the years I have used a number of ways to work out what is best for me when I’m racing. And consequently I have also figured what works best when I’m training.

The key ways I’ve used to figure this out are my experience & Stillman height / weight tables.

First of all, my experience…

When I started competing in the early 90’s, I weighed a very meagre 63kg. Yes, I did look almost like a “famine victim”, but I could run 10km in the mid 32-minute range. The problem was that I was a bit poor on the bike if I’m honest - how much power could I realistically expect to produce with so little muscle-mass.

After about a year in the UK in 1996 -with a lot of cycling & weight training - I found that I had gained 8kg, mostly muscle-mass. I was still very lean. And it was at 71kg that among other good races, I did my Ironman PB.

So based on my experience, I reckon that a good race weight for me is around 71kg.

Now the height / weight tables…

A few years ago, looking for some sort of validation of my experience, I came across the very commonly used Stillman tables. These are actually used to calculate a healthy height & weight for the average sedentary person, but with a little manipulation, you can get a good idea of what is reasonable.

The basic calculation for men is an allowance of 110lbs for the first 5ft in height and an additional 5.5lbs per extra inch. Based on this, a healthy weight for an average person of my height is 77.5kg (170.5lbs). But this is for an average sedentary person. Elite marathoners would expect to be 15% lighter (65.8kg), but at this weight, I’d expect to be way down on cycling power. I felt that perhaps halfway would be a reasonable figure, giving a race weight of 71.6kg. This should allow me to run a good Ironman marathon without sacrificing my bike split.

[The basic calculation for women allows 100lbs for the first 5ft and 5lbs per extra inch.]

One more calculation I could consider here is my BMI. A BMI below 22 seems to be generally accepted as a good mark for an endurance athlete. This would require a maximum race weight of 71.3kg.

Clearly a race weight is something I wouldn’t want to hold for too long. Among other things, I look extremely thin, too thin if you were to ask my wife! From experience, I aim to train at 2.5kg more. This lets me hold a little more body fat during my training.

But weight in & of itself is not the whole story. One also has to factor in body composition. Based on figures for elite marathoners, cyclists etc, it’s not unreasonable to race at between 5 & 10 % body fat, but much below 10% is likely to be risky for an endurance athlete to maintain for too long a period. Certainly I find that at those sorts of numbers for prolonged periods, I’m both very hungry all the time & susceptible to upper respiratory infection. There are also potential hormonal issues involved at very low body fat levels. And I feel cold really easily. After all, I do live in England!

Once you achieve your desired body fat levels, you have to ask yourself seriously whether it’s worth shifting muscle mass in order to make your target race weight.

As you’ll see from all of the above, there’s a high degree of “feel” in this approach. Each person will differ slightly, if not a fair bit from these numbers. The main thing to keep in mind is that simply being lighter may not actually be the best way to go faster.

OK, you all know the script from previous years…

In the Coach of the Year category, I finished… second. Actually one place better than I expected and I did break Andy’s stranglehold on the competition. Unfortunately, so did Simon Ward. And it seems he did it a bit better than me.

Am I disappointed? Yes. Am I gutted? No, not really. It would have been nice to win it & should you all vote me into the second round next year, we’ll try again.

So thank-you one & all for taking the time to vote for me, it really is much appreciated. And I hope you know that I will continue to work on building the best value coaching service I possibly can. And no, I will never become a large corporation, I’m a coach, not a manager!

Having said all that, and just in case you weren’t following my Twitter feed direct from the dinner on Saturday night, here are the winners again…

Women’s Age Group Athlete of the Year - Sophie Whitworth (pleased about that, she’s a good friend)
Triathlon Website of the Year - Tri247.com
Coach of the Year - Simon Ward (what do I have to do to win?)
Race of the Year, Entries <500 - Ilkley Triathlon
Running Shoe of the Year - Saucony Fastwitch 2
Men’s Duathlete of the Year - Paul Amey
Women’s Elite Triathlete of the Year - Chrissie Wellington (who else, she’s awesome!)
Innovative Product of the Year - Newton Running Shoes (with a name like that, what do you expect?)
Men’s Age Group Athlete of the Year - Hywel Davies (±20 hours for a double ironman, I voted for him)
Wetsuit of the Year - Blue Seventy Helix
Youth Triathlete of the Year - Holly Avil (well, if she wasn’t racing in the World Cup, she could race as a junior, though it might be a bit hard on the other juniors)
Distributor of the Year - Planet X
Race of the Year, Entries >500 - Vitruvian (a very popular choice and two very funny guys)
Mail Order Company of the Year - Wiggle (shall we just call it the “Wiggle” award?)
Women’s Duathlete of the Year - Catriona Morrison
Bike of the Year - Cervelo P3C
Male Elite Triathlete of the Year - Alistair Brownlee (so popular, nearly brought the house down!)
Retailer of the Year - Total Fitness Nottingham
Club of the Year - VO2 Maximum (friends & clients, I was chuffed to bits!)
Outstanding Contribution to Triathlon - Chrissie Wellington

It was a lovely evening, Tim Brabants was a superb speaker and both Rachel & I felt it more than worth the drive to Sandown - well done 220 Magazine!

Yup, it’s official: Ironman UK 2009 will be held in Bolton.

My first thought was, “Why do we want to go to Bolton to do Ironman?” But then I reasoned that

• There are as many triathletes up north as there are down south.
• The road quality can’t be any worse than Sherborne.
• The weather can’t be any worse than any of the times I’ve been to Sherborne.
• Isn’t it about time that those up north got to show how enthusiastic they can be about an endurance event - maybe they can be a bit more like the Europeans than the Dorset public!

So, assuming that I have athletes racing at IMUK, I’ll be more then happy to drive the 250 miles to get there.

Having avoided it for so long, have I become a social networking junkie?

I’d like to believe not, I only visit facebook for a few minutes a day (and by the way, I still have way too few friends!) and I have yet to throw a snowball at anyone - what’s that all about then?

But I have joined Twitter. Apparently it’s the way people knew what was going on in Mumbai and most of the media were relying on it too. Not to mention the fact that Lance Armstrong (yup, he of the Tour De France), is an inveterate Twitterer - this morning we found out that he was on his way to Starbucks and that they were playing Christmas music.

Twitter provides the opportunity to “micro-blog” short snippets of 140 characters, ideal for that passing thought that you haven’t time to develop into a full blog post, article or email. Ideal for me then, I have regular of flashes of insanity, brilliance and just plain thoughts.

So much like I’m following Lance, you can follow me on Twitter. Go on, I dare you!

Newly added to Will Newton Multisport Coaching for 2009 is Event Coaching Support. I currently have 6 events which I plan to attend and during the weekend of which I will provide coaching support to clients whose package includes race-support, who are racing. And of course, chat to all and sundry in the sunshine (??). More races may be added soon, but the provisional list is…

• Cambridge Duathlon - 19/4/09
• New Forest Triathlon - 3/5/09
• Ironman UK 70.3 - 14/6/09
• Jordon’s Bedford Triathlon - 19/7/09
• Ironman UK - 19/8/09 (still only a provisional date for the race I believe)
• Forestman Middle Distance 20/9/09

Do you have an event you’d like me to attend? Let me know & I’ll see what I can do.

Yup, they’re a nuisance to cyclists of all types and all abilities - at best, a bit of a jarring bump, at worst, bent wheels, road rash, chipped teeth and the screeching of brakes from the car about to run over you as you fall into the middle of the road. Let’s hope it’s always the best!

Councils in the UK have a responsibility to fix potholes, but I’m convinced that they either don’t know they’re there, or they choose to ignore them until someone tells them about it. And let’s face it, how many of us has the time to spend navigating the telephone system that our local council has set up specifically to deter us from calling them to complain?

At last there is an answer in the form of a new website called FillThatHole! All you have to do is to fill in a short form and the nice folks at the CTC will take it from there. You even get to pinpoint the location using Google Earth.

Does it work? Why not give it a try, I have… and I await the miraculous vanishing of my local death-trap.

It’s not often I say anything about the CTC (my mum told me that if I don’t have anything nice to say…), but here’s a huge thumbs up to the folks with the panniers!

And just in case you’re a mountain biker & you’re out on your favourite (legal) trail, only to be confronted by an unwelcome obstacle, there’s ClearThatTrail, where they’ll do the same sort of thing, just this time to get that locked gate unlocked or move that conveniently placed “fallen tree.”

I’ve just spoken on a coaching call to a client who has been diagnosed with swimmer’s ear. But it seems that the doctor didn’t explain what this was and what to do to prevent it in the future. Having suffered with swimmer’s ear early on in my triathlon career, I thought I’d give you the quick rundown.

Swimmers ear can result from any inflammation of the ear canal, but is usually caused by bacteria or in a small number of cases, by a fungal infection. It is more likely to occur if…

• You clean your ears with cotton-tipped earbuds or similar, because these remove the protective wax lining from the ear canal.
• You wear earplugs, hearing aids or earphones regularly.
• You swim or surf a lot and get water in or ears - a warm, wet atmosphere is ideal for the growth of the nasties that cause swimmer’s ear.

So, what do you do about it?

Well, if you have swimmer’s ear already, the a trip to your doctor is a good idea. He’ll usually give you some eardrops and get you to put olive oil in your ear every day - nice!

Once the infection has cleared up, you can either use custom earplugs every time you swim in order to minimise the water that ends up in the ear.These are preferable to the reusable putty or even Blutack that I have seen swimmers use - apparently Blutack isn’t very good for ears! My father-in-law uses custom earplugs when he goes surfing and swears by them.

Surf Plugs

Or you can invest in the slightly less costly option of swimmer’s ear drops. These are a slightly acidic solution, which both clear the water from the ear and provide an acidic environment disliked by the bacteria and fungi responsible. I’ve used these for the last 15 years or so and haven’t suffered with swimmer’s ear again.

Swimmer' Ear Drops

The only other alternative I can think of doesn’t bear thinking of… you could stop swimming!