10 Of The Biggest Training Mistakes Cyclists Make
Topics covered in this episode:
- Poor sleep
- Poor hydration
- Poor nutrition
- No taper
- Train too much with Data
- Train too much with emotion
- Start too hard
- Athletes don’t know their equipment
- Athletes don’t tell their coach the important stuff
- Too much stress on a particular day vs not enough focus for the year
Guest Bio – Jane Marshall:
Jane Marshall is a CTS Pro Coach with CTS who has coached athletes for events like Leadville, Ironman, La Ruta, Cape Epic, and many others. You can read more about her here: https://trainright.com/coaches/jane-rynbrandt-marshall/
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform
Thanks To This Week’s Sponsor:
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Episode Transcription:
Please note that this is an automated transcription and may contain errors. Please refer to the episode audio for clarification.
Adam Pulford (00:00:07):
History can repeat itself. If you let it meaning you can make the same mistake over and over again, if you don’t correct it, it’s human nature. In fact, as our brains and bodies prefer homeostasis, as opposed to spending a bunch of energy to do something different, improving costs more. But if you want to be different than the rest, you need to evaluate your experiences in aim to do it better or differently. Next time to become more successful. This is a huge part of being an athlete and the process by which good coaches try to teach their athletes. I thought it fitting to have another coach as a guest on today’s show. And not just any guest, mind you, but a fellow CTS coach who has seen me at my best and my worst of times over many years. She’s one of my best friends and will correct me when I’m wrong, probably on this podcast. Uh, she’ll pull me up when I’m down and she’ll make fun of me when I think I’m too smart, but she’s one of our top coaches at CTS and always reminds me of how far we’ve come in our coaching experience since we did our internships together more than, uh, about 16 years ago. So Jane Marshall, welcome to the show.
Jane Marshall (00:01:15):
Thanks Adam. Super stoked to be here.
Adam Pulford (00:01:20):
Good. Well for those listeners who don’t know you as good as I do, uh, can you tell us a little bit more about who Jane is?
Jane Marshall (00:01:29):
Absolutely. As you said, I’m a coach for CTS and I started coaching back in 2006 when we were right out of college and we did our resident coach program together in Colorado Springs. And now I work mostly with masters athletes, cyclists, runners, triathletes, and it really gravitated towards those undertaking crazy ultra events like Loretta stage races, race across America, Leadville, anything. Um, just the name of you. And I’m a mom of two, a four year old or almost four year old and a 14 month old who keeps me busy in addition, in addition to coaching. Full-time
Adam Pulford (00:02:12):
Nice. Nice, nice, nice. And, uh, where are you calling or where am I calling you from today?
Jane Marshall (00:02:18):
Yeah, we live in Littleton, Colorado kind of back up in the foothills of Denver and we have some awesome, awesome mountain biking and road riding right from our house.
Adam Pulford (00:02:30):
They do. I mean, it’s, it’s a pure joy to go visit Jane and the kids and in Brad and, uh, go, go rip up some single track. So, um, I am, I am calling from, or I am sitting here in North Carolina. So this is my first episode on the road for any listeners who have been listening. And for those watching on the YouTube platform or something, you may see a different background, but that’s, uh, I just got done with the BWR. It is super orange. Isn’t it? Is it, uh, is it, I can’t do anything about it. I was going to say, is it too orange? Do we need to call it a little bit?
Adam Pulford (00:03:05):
Cool. Well, yeah, just did a BWR Asheville and, uh, Jane was gracious enough to, um, come in after working with one of my athletes, actually for a mountain bike skills camp today up in Colorado. So this is fun to have her on, but before we get into this thing, I really want to throw out a big disclaimer and Janie can Chan, you know, jam in at any time here, but we do not consider ourselves perfect or mistake free. Usually when you’ve learned a lot, it’s because you’ve done some really stupid stuff yourself. So we’ve made all the mistakes, we’ve done all the silly stuff and you know, it’s true here for myself, especially. So please take these suggestions on how to improve from two people who have really had a lot of woopsies in their life, both in, in coaching and racing and training, but yet we’ve always tried to do it better, try to refine the process so that we can teach others. And now we’re trying to help you all our listeners, uh, to avoid some of these common pitfalls and mistakes that we have done ourselves. And we see athletes doing, uh, far too many times. So with that, let’s get into it.
Adam Pulford (00:04:17):
All right. So you could probably consider this like the top 10 that we thought of, uh, commonly, uh, done big mistakes for all athletes, but I will start with probably like the foundation, which is sleep. So Jane, do you have any bad sleepers out there
Jane Marshall (00:04:35):
Other than my kids?
Adam Pulford (00:04:39):
Well, you got kids in there too.
Jane Marshall (00:04:42):
My kids are actually great sleepers. Uh, but yes. Oh man, I have, I would say most people struggle with sleep. It’s seems to be the bane of existence. I mean, there’s so much to do and not enough hours in the day and the sleep is one of those things that seems to get kicked to the curb first.
Adam Pulford (00:05:02):
Why is that? What do you think that is?
Jane Marshall (00:05:06):
Maybe people don’t think it’s so important and it’s, it’s easy to stay up and answer that next email or watch that next episode on Netflix or in a lot of my athletes work full-time jobs and the time they have to do their training is before work or after work. So either they’re getting up early or they’re trying to squeeze it in after work, after dinner, after time with the kids. And then they’re a little amped up from their training sessions, hard to settle down and fall asleep.
Adam Pulford (00:05:39):
Yeah. In, in, I mean, I’ll speak with myself too. I mean, the first thing I normally do to, um, jam something else in is to cut some sleep in order to, uh, get that other thing done. Um, however, I would say the more we’re learning about sleep these days in myself included, but the more research that is coming, we really, it only confirms what we kind of already knew that sleep is if we’ve been looking for a holy grail, it’s it’s truly sleep when it comes to recovery and adaptation and being healthy, let alone have performance. Yeah, absolutely. So how do you, how do you communicate that to your athletes? Like, like if you find an athlete maybe dodging some sleep or not getting enough or, or maybe just bringing some awareness or education to them, I mean, how do you manage that with your athletes?
Jane Marshall (00:06:29):
We kind of go through the checklist of, are you doing everything right? To set yourself up for good sleep? So are you, you know, taking a little time to wind down, you know, shutting that phone off, um, big things, you know, that I do to set up is, is it cold, dark and quiet or another one is, do you sleep with a sound machine? And, you know, funny story where I was going through these checklists with an athlete, like, okay, is it dark in your room is a cold, you know, yes, my wife is, you know, post-menopausal or menopausal, so it’s freezing, you know, dark, you know, but the sound was cheating thing. And if you know, a neighbor’s dog barks or something, sometimes that white noise can cut that out. And my athlete was like, yeah, my wife’s talked to me about that and I can bend kind of resistant.
Jane Marshall (00:07:18):
But now that you’ve mentioned it, now that coach James brought it up, maybe we’ll look into that white noise machine. And sure enough, couple of days later, he’s like it’s improving. So something, you know, is waking them up in the middle of the night and that white noise can help drawn it out. So, you know, just talk through those things and maybe there’s a little tip. Um, and I also, I go around, I’m a Nazi with the black electrical tape and tape over the lights on the fan and the lights on the baby monitor and all those little things that you may not think are a big deal and they actually wake you up.
Adam Pulford (00:07:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s true. I mean, uh, if you go to a lot of sleep research, I mean, it is, uh, cold dark rooms and it’s like, what is cold for you? I mean, it seems like a go-to number to shoot for is about 69 degrees, 68 degrees. Um, so it’s, it’s cooler than probably many people think and dark and quiet because our bodies, our eyes, uh, respond to the light, meaning it’s time to get up. Right. So the darker it is, whether it’s a blue light or yellow light or whatever light, as soon as your eyes start to take that in it’s, it’s cuing you to wake up. Yup.
Jane Marshall (00:08:33):
And then we can even just like anything with coaching. I love, I love tracking things and I love the numbers and the analysis and having athletes turn on some type of tracker, whether it’s a whoop on or a ring. I know for me, I thought I was getting, you know, great eight to nine hours of sleep. Turns out it was more in the seven hour range when I actually looked at the time I was asleep. And so that brought awareness to it and it was like, okay, let’s try to get that extra hour in. And I think same thing for a lot of athletes when they, yeah. We think you’re getting eight hours, nine hours, or, you know, maybe people are shooting for six or seven as an improvement and they’re not, it’s actually a lot less.
Adam Pulford (00:09:17):
Yeah, exactly. And do you, are you a whoop or a, or a person or a person or a person. Okay. So when you’re looking and your athletes have both, I take it. Yep. Okay. And when you’re tracking that over time, are you just using the app on your phone? Are you dumping it into training peaks as well and looking at trends over time, or you just kind of like for, let’s just start with yourself. How do you look at that data?
Jane Marshall (00:09:48):
Uh, I mean, well, I’m, I love my data. So first thing in the morning I wake up and look, you know, open the app. Okay. How’d I sleep, what’s my score. And, you know, try not to get too obsessed about it, but is it, you know, how much time was I sleeping? And, you know, my goal, I kind of set for myself as trying to get close to that eight hour range. And, you know, I kind of look trends over time. I don’t do a great job of tracking it for myself and training peaks, but it’s something I urge my athletes to, or if they don’t want to input it, send me a screenshot, you know, let’s look back and definitely look for trends over time. Um, especially with heavier training loads are going into a big goal event.
Adam Pulford (00:10:30):
And so having that tool like as an awareness to, I call it yourself to then teach athletes. Are you doing anything different now that you have the ring or now that you have data from your athletes than you were doing before this wearable technology? Yeah,
Jane Marshall (00:10:48):
I think the, the big one is, like I said, you know what we think we’re doing and then what we’re actually doing and that bringing more awareness like, oh yeah, I think I’m doing a good job with sleep or you, you know, trends down to nutrition or hydration, but how much am I actually getting in? What is that, that number and how can I improve it? And that that’s been the big take home one with me in the sleep. You know, there’s some things I don’t have control over, you know, the kids wake up in the middle of the night, you know, yada, yada, but it’s that, you know what I’m getting to bed.
Adam Pulford (00:11:25):
Yup, yup. No, that’s it. And you mentioned, you mentioned that that last part there is getting to bed. And I think that if, if anything that you can summarize here, it’s like have a bedtime try to stick to it as best as you can and try to be as consistent with getting, you know, reaching for that eight hours of sleep. So your consistency over time really prevails when it comes to a sound night’s sleep.
Jane Marshall (00:11:49):
Have you noticed anything with your athletes with COVID and maybe not traveling as much and athletes doing a better job with bedtime with less, less travel?
Adam Pulford (00:12:01):
Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s, that’s a good question. Uh, during like, uh, true COVID, uh, I know we’re, we’re like in this in-between time period for a timestamp where a Delta is ramping up and, and, uh, and everything, but when we were more shut down, I would say that, uh, you know, there, a lot of my outfits are fortunate to be in the position to have not only discretionary income to pay for a coach, but also, uh, work from home and, and still train and do all the things. And so it was an opportunity for me to be like, Hey, we have more time now, time to train time to do stuff. However, you still need to get routine. So where I started with a lot of people was asleep habits and you drill down on that and it was just like getting consistent with a good, good, consistent bedtime, kind of a few hacks of cooling everything down.
Adam Pulford (00:12:47):
But yeah, I think I created a lot more better sleepers during COVID and a lot of people were like, oh wow. Like I feel really good as opposed to, um, this is continual like funk that everybody was in, uh, because of just like charging hard, you know, planes and conferences and in meetings and all the things. So, um, but, but to your point, I mean, it’s, um, you there’s a feel and there a reality, and we’ll get into this with some other training data, but I think it definitely applies here with, with sleep because you can feel like you had a good night’s sleep where you can look at the data and the data can either confirm it or deny it in. Like you said, you try not to put too much stock in it, like right away on the morning. Cause he was like, man, I feel pretty good, but maybe I didn’t sleep so well.
Adam Pulford (00:13:34):
And there’s both data and feel to it because if you felt like you were getting eight hours of sleep, but really you were seeing that you’re only six. It’s like, oh man, and now you change it. And then all of a sudden you feel better. Right. And that’s where w yeah. And that’s where some of the power tracking or heart rate tracking all is going to, you can feel like you’re doing 400 Watts going up a hill hockey like that every time that’s right. Right. But then you look at the reality and no, you’re not right. So it’s, it’s a, this data can help ground us in what is actual to make better decisions, uh, to improve our health and improve our, our performance. Yep. So, um, nailed it in a super nailed it. Uh, let’s move on to hydration. So, Jane, do you have any, do you have any bad hydrators out there? That’s bad. Hydrators you
Jane Marshall (00:14:31):
Have, I’ve worked really hard with a lot of athletes, especially on a race day nutrition and a lot of people, I feel like a lot of my people do a really good job with that. We’ve worked very hard, like I said, and now I’m working as things kind of pick back up with COVID travel, we’re working more on the, off the bike stuff. It’s like, okay, how much have you, you know, what have you had to drink today besides, you know, what you were doing when you were riding? And so kind of stepping back and looking at those daily habits and trying to do a better job off the bike. And that seems to make it impacted. People are just, you know, they’re running ragged, like, oh, I have a headache. I feel run down. Okay, well, let’s step back and look at the big picture. You know, what have you had to eat to drink? What have you had to drink today? How was it going into your training ride and, you know, on the sleep thing, you know, making I know for myself and Brad, we try to, you know, front load the day with hydration a little bit better. So you’re not waking up to, you know, pee in the middle of the night because you’ve been crunch trying to crunch and all your hydration at the end of the day.
Speaker 4 (00:15:36):
So yeah.
Jane Marshall (00:15:39):
I mean, that’s, that’s kinda the trend I’m seeing with my athletes. Um,
Speaker 4 (00:15:44):
So
Adam Pulford (00:15:48):
Yup. No, it’s, and that’s important too, because I think that we can get super hung up on, uh, fueling for the event fueling during, and there’s a lot of things that you can control and you can calculate, and that’s cool. Right. But like, if you’re going in to a five-hour day already dehydrated, that best plan is really not going to prevail. So I mean, having that big picture of, uh, what is, what are your habits over time? Are you a good hydrator consistently? That’s probably more important. Right. And I’ve joked before with some athletes. It’s just like, what, you know, we’re like salty sacks of bones flying around on bikes, right? Like we just, we’re very, we’re mostly water. That’s my point. And, um, when we’re out there using our bodies and doing things and even like sitting here, um, we, we do need to take on water.
Adam Pulford (00:16:41):
I’m not one to say, you need to just sit there and guzzle water all the time because you know, food can be hydrating as well, soups and in drinks and coffee and tea and watermelon. I mean, all these examples, sorry, alcohol does not quantify as a, uh, positive fluid there, but basically anything that’s not alcohol really hosts hydrate you. And so, you know, when you’re working with athletes, yes. I agree. Jane, normally we’re getting granular about the, during the training. So I’m glad you brought up the bigger picture of all the other stuff. Um, what are, what are some things that you’re checking on to make sure that your athletes are hydrated on and off the bike? What are indicators to you?
Jane Marshall (00:17:27):
Uh, when we talk, you know, again, those early morning, you know, first thing in the morning, jumping on the trainer had an outside. Okay. You drinking a glass of water with your coffee. First thing in the morning, I know if I’m running around crazy with the kids and I’ve just had coffee and all of a sudden I’m driving them to school and I’m like, Ooh, I’m really thirsty. And you know, my window to get my in is when they’re at school, you know, I sneak out between coaching calls for an hour. And if I haven’t done a good job of hydrating in the morning, then it’s, you don’t feel good. Especially some of the crazy heat waves we’ve had this summer, he does a whole nother whole nother podcast. Um, but that’s just, you have to be extra, extra pay attention to that. Um, especially, you know, like Pacific Northwest people that hadn’t had a lot of that heat. It’s like, okay, let’s pay extra attention to this. You know, maybe throw a little, you know, sports drink in that morning, big glass of water or water bottle at your sipping on through the day. Not just plain water, having some salt in there, mix it up a little bit. And you, I have people that don’t like drinking plain water. So Brad doesn’t drink plain water. So it’s like, Hey, let’s throw an unhappy in there. Let’s find some coconut waters and sparkling water, something that’s going to make. You want to drink a little bit more.
Jane Marshall (00:18:45):
That’s husband, Brad, for everybody listening.
Adam Pulford (00:18:50):
Sorry. I had to throw that in there. Um, yeah, in, in, I think, I think that is all really good in terms of the doing, do you, I mean, let’s talk about, let’s talk about urine here because it is important in, I think it is one thing as we’re say, in competition or out of competition, uh, to check on a urine color. So do you ever check on that with your athlete’s chain? Or is that something that you’re like, eh, I don’t really
Jane Marshall (00:19:14):
Go there. No. I mean, we, we talk about everything. So, you know, definitely, you know, dark brown, yellow, you know, all the things, you know, not good. He even talked to the kids about that. It’s like, okay, you got it. You got to drink a little bit more water. And when everything works, your whole body works better if you stay hydrated. So, you know, making checking in the athletes, okay, this is what your, your enclose should look like. Or if they need some of that feedback, you know, your analysis strips, they’re super data. I mean, sometimes they need to see your house, some concrete thing to look at, to know, okay. Yes, I’m doing a good job or no, I need to improve
Speaker 4 (00:19:51):
This. And you’re in colors and easy
Adam Pulford (00:19:54):
Way. Yup. And those, those you’re in color is super easy. So we want like a pale yellow, right. Jane. Yeah, exactly. What if it’s super clear all the time?
Jane Marshall (00:20:07):
Well then, then we may be, you know, going the other way over hydrating a little bit drinking too much. Or if you’re jumping up from your office chair every 30 minutes to go to the bathroom, then maybe we need to tone it down or add some sports drink in there.
Adam Pulford (00:20:23):
Yeah. Sport drink with, uh, primarily sodium electrolytes to, uh, in what happens there is just, um, pressure different or, um, concentration difference in between, um, uh, the stomach in ind, uh, kind of the interstitial fluids. Right? You throw some electrolytes in there, the body will retain more water and will make you pee less. So whether it’s sitting at the, is sitting at the desk or in bed at night or on the bike, that’s a primary driver of why we have electrolytes in our, in our drinks. For sure. Um, so for sodium Jane, do you do anything like, um, sweat testing or anything specific to really hone in and drill down into how much sodium or electrolytes people are doing, or is it just come back to like consistency and habits?
Jane Marshall (00:21:11):
I will do done sweat testing in some specific cases where someone has maybe had some health issues or issues during continued issues during events where we’re trying to drill down. Uh, I was working with a guy who had some heart issues and, um, had health issues during longer events. And we were going through all the checklists and things and, you know, the nutrition plan and hydration plan that we came up with was, you know, really in line. And it just still wasn’t making sense. And I think I actually talked to you and a couple of their coaches and I was like, let’s do it, let’s do some sweat testing. And it came back that he was just one of the saltiest sweaters I’d ever seen. And so we adjusted the amount of sodium that he was taking in and that it fixed it. It was just, it was crazy. Um, and so I think in really specific cases, you know, maybe not for everyone, uh, if you kind of fall on that bell curve, right. Where you have people that are going to be on the outer edges, you know, really, really salty or maybe, you know, hardly lose any sodium at all. And you know, those people I think, is beneficial to, to find that and figure that out and really individualize and personalize their sodium intake.
Adam Pulford (00:22:33):
Yup, yup. Really good point. And I think it goes back to this, um, data versus fuel again, where it’s, you can feel like you’re a salty sweater or not. And then there’s some indicators too. Like if you’re having salt rings on your, um, clothing and all, that’s a good indicator that you’re somewhat of a salty sweater. However, if you’re up high and dry sweating a lot for a time period, and then it’s there. I mean, everybody has salt in their sweat. So a lot of people will have that doesn’t necessarily mean you are. So it is really good. Like if, if you want to explore this more, go get the test done, get the data to confirm, then go, uh, go about your, uh, intake protocols, uh, adjusted accordingly. And that’s where I do think that like, data’s awesome as opposed to just making something up in your head and be like, oh, all the salt.
Jane Marshall (00:23:21):
Yep. And if he super, you know, super salty meal or take some hyper hyperhydrate or high sodium loading before, yeah. You’re going to, you’re going to sweat out a ton of sodium during your event and it’s super crusty helmet, straps, and good salt rings on your Jersey and bibs. And we’ve all seen those riders when we’ve been out.
Adam Pulford (00:23:42):
Yup. Yup. And in just because you have, and that’s a good point, Jane is like, you can control that too in your body and your body will adjust. If you just take on a bunch, your body’s going to kick it out. Cause if it’s not using it, so yeah. Well that kind of segues over to our nutrition component. Do you have any, do you have any poor eaters, Jane? No, man. Everyone,
Jane Marshall (00:24:10):
Every everyone’s got, you know, food that food issues, not issues, but preferences and likes and dislikes and habits. That’s a better word for it is, is habits. Yeah. And you know, some definitely better than others and you know, I kind of two categories, right. It’s on the bike and off the bike. And I don’t know which one you want to tackle first. Um,
Adam Pulford (00:24:33):
Your choice, my choice.
Jane Marshall (00:24:36):
Um, I think the simpler one, or I guess when we can kind of throw more of a blanket over, you know, off the bike is just your general nutrition. There’s so many different fads and diets and things out there. It’s so individual of what works for you. And just because you’re, you know, buddy on the group ride does really well, you know, eating steak three times a day doesn’t mean that you need to eat steak three times a day. And so it’s finding what works for you. And there is no magic answer. You know, people always ask, you know, what do you eat? Well, I, I eat pretty much everything within moderation and, and I found foods that work really well for my body and foods that I love to eat before rides and workouts and things that I gravitate towards. And they’re generally pretty healthy. You know, we want, you know, shop the outside of the food, food aisles in the grocery store, you know, real fruits, vegetables, grain, dairy, all that stuff. And I think people make mistakes of trying to cut things out or find that magic answer for losing weight or for performance. And you just got to step back and keep it simple.
Adam Pulford (00:25:46):
Yeah. It solid advice for sure. In a, in, I do think we share the same approach of, you know, uh, food habits. It can get really weird. Like you said, everybody has, has these habits and they can sometimes almost become religious. Right? Like I think athletes in, in elite athletes in particular, what I’ve seen is they, they impose a lot of rules upon themself with, with food and that can be taken to a disordered eating or just like kind of quirky weirdness, right? Because maybe something worked for them at one point and then therefore they stick with it or this person’s doing that. Like you said, the, the person on the group right. Or whatever. And so we form these habits, um, to do it. And then the tricky part is because bodies are actually very adaptable. The fuel source, you, you can, your stomach, your body will adapt to a fuel source.
Adam Pulford (00:26:37):
If all you ate was fat. If all you had was, uh, olive oil and in, in salt was some ultra runners back in the day. I remember, uh, coop telling us about that. And I’m just like, and they probably had a little bit more, but like they go on these long runs and that’s what they would do. But then it was like, so slow speeds. And I’m not advising anybody to do this here. Um, I’m sure you wouldn’t feel that great. And there’s going to be a time period where you wouldn’t feel that great. If you didn’t have all three macronutrients, fat, carbohydrate and protein going into the system. But my point is, is like our bodies are very adaptable like that. So you want to start with, you want to, you want to start with what we know to be true, which is again, having those three macronutrients in there. And then as Jean said, there is some individuality here in know, thyself is actually a pretty good thing to keep in mind here, experiment and keep what works, change what doesn’t.
Jane Marshall (00:27:30):
And if you’re going, we’ve had people you think about racing and stories. You know, people, you go travel internationally. I mean, you and I we’ve taken groups all over the world for mountain bike road, stage races, adventures. And you know, what’s over in South Africa is not necessarily what’s, you know, back home in your kitchen in Colorado and right. Being, being flexible and not freaking out if they don’t have your exact brand of oatmeal or bread or, you know, whatever for breakfast and being okay with that. And you know, we do a lot of prep with those athletes before we go. And yeah, maybe you do bring your Justin’s almond butter packets with you, you know, to, to go, but not having it be the end of the world, if something’s a little bit different.
Adam Pulford (00:28:24):
Yeah. That’s it. And, and I think rather than giving some hard, fast approach for people to, to do on the food aspect, I’d say the hard, fast thing not to do is to eliminate a macronutrient entirely, meaning going low carb or going low fat or something like this, your, your body needs all three. And then those macronutrients fat carbohydrate protein, those are what I’m talking about. However, um, I am a big fan of fueling for your goals and that can change throughout the time period that throughout the year or whatever cycle that we’re talking about here, in terms of training, meaning in heavier harder training phases with higher volume and higher intensity carbohydrates king for a fuel source, a muscle glycogen liver glycogen, for example, and you need carbohydrate coming into the system in order to perform in order to heal in order to replenish. And so when you’re not doing that, when you’re just doing exercise, meaning like six hours a week or something like that, or something call it 50% less than what you normally would be doing, you don’t need to be going high carbohydrate. You still need some, right. But that’s where you can up the fat up the protein to feel fuller for longer and in, in, in remain healthy. Would you agree with that?
Jane Marshall (00:29:44):
Yeah, no, I agree. A hundred percent and kind of go on, you know, the carb is king. There’s been such this entire carb movement, the last five, five years. It’s and it’s hard because everyone again is looking for that, you know, a lot of our athletes, you know, yeah. They want to lose five to 20 pounds and, you know, climb faster up hill and carbs, just have this bad stigma and, and said, you know, what we need to fuel are your races and your eyes and your training. And I’d say, you know, one of the biggest mistakes I see my athletes make is not eating enough out training and racing. And I’ve a specific athlete. And I think this will segue us into, you know, kind of on the next points we want to talk about in that data. And that feedback is we’ve been, we’ve had this athlete has been CTS, healthy athlete for probably 10 years.
Jane Marshall (00:30:39):
And it’s something we’ve been working on. You have to eat more than your eyes. And he does ultra road, like hot route where you’re climbing 10,000 feet a day, multiple days in a row. And you ha you have to fuel those workouts and that race. I mean, it’s a 4,000 kilojoule day. You can’t just go and eat three strip waffles. I mean, you’ve got to take in more than that. And I mean, it’s just like banging my head against wall. And then finally we have, you know, uh, things to feel Sutherland and super sapiens, a weight to kind of measure blood glucose and, and see that in real time. And finally it’s like the light bulb went off with this athlete and like, oh, I need to eat more. He just had to hear it from someone else or had to see the data. And now, you know, he’s 60, 61 years old and this put out his best 20 minute power ever in an event and is just killing it because he’s actually eating on the bike and, you know, as was mad and as frustrating as it is, I’m stoked that we have this.
Jane Marshall (00:31:47):
Then I, you know, I’m excited about the new technology. Um, and I hope it’s going to have a lot of light bulbs go off in a lot of athletes.
Adam Pulford (00:31:58):
Yeah. In a, that’s a really cool story. And I would say, I am finding similar things with, with my athletes, um, super sapiens for those who don’t know, and there will be a podcast, uh, knock on wood here, um, uh, coming up, uh, with some of the, the inventors of this, but you can, you can Google it, but what they are is they’re wearing a continuous glucose monitor to measure your blood glucose inside your body. And when you eat more sugar, uh, the blood glucose goes up. The reason why that’s good is it’s, it can provide fuel to the working muscle and what they app and technology provides for you is some, um, uh, say fueling goals, uh, for a ride or a race or your training. So consider it like time and zone for a power meter or heart rate monitor, uh, goals to hit while you’re training.
Adam Pulford (00:32:51):
And then depending on your goals, there’s also goals to hit when you’re not training. So off hours approach. And so, yeah, I agree, Jane and it’s led to some really cool conversations as well as insights on for my athletes in myself in particular. And also to see what that individuality is like, how your, how your body responds to rice versus mine, or how your body responds to rice and rice with, uh, fat and protein, right? So rice with, um, like, uh, eggs in olive oil or something like that. And because it is different, if you have just pure white rice, um, the what’s going to happen is your blood sugar will rise and then it’ll probably come down, right? It’s for some people, it might have them feel a little wonky there and then come back up. Uh, but if you add in a little protein and fat, you probably won’t get that spike for most people that have normal metabolic conditions. No,
Jane Marshall (00:33:44):
That’s a, again, you know, one of those tracker tools, that’s bringing more awareness than I know myself. I was so guilty of, you know, disruption and then jumping out to go on the bike and maybe you starting a ride or an interval session not fueled enough. And then thus not getting maybe the best results. And then this year with having that technology and being able to see it, okay. Check, okay, what’s my blue blood glucose before I’m going out. You know, what’s kind of been my carb, uh, intake so far today. Oh, I’m low. Okay. Let me eat something before I got untrained. And it’s resulted in, you know, some of the best training and power numbers that I’ve done, you know, probably ever and feeling better. And, you know, again, what you think you’re doing versus what you’re actually doing. And I love it. Um, I’m super excited.
Adam Pulford (00:34:46):
Yup. And in I’ll remind listeners too, as we’re talking about these technologies and especially like the, on the bike immediate conditions, when it comes to fueling hydration, there’s insights to help fix a problem right then and there, however, you’re going to be way better off if you bring in proper fueling and hydration to those, uh, training sessions and to those, uh, uh, races, uh, meaning you’re in good habit for fueling both hydration and nutrition coming into that rather than trying to fix a problem, um, immediately because a lot of glycogen replenishment, meaning muscles in liver that have stored muscle glycogen that you’re gonna use for your workouts. It takes 24 to 48 hours to fully replenish. Okay. And no matter what the blood is during the time period, if those are obsolete, or if those are low, ain’t nothing gonna help you on the start line, right.
Adam Pulford (00:35:44):
You need to fuel properly immediately. Right now, drink early, drink off in order to survive. But at some point you just don’t have the reserves that you could have, if you would have been better about it, bringing into that. Yeah. Can’t do anything. If you show up with an empty tank, that’s it, that’s straight up. Uh, my last point before we move on is, um, my last moment before we move on is in a little comfort food can make your world a better place. And this is to keep things healthy. Like we talked about some, even scratch the surface of eating disorders and that’s a whole other thing, but like, you don’t have to be so regimented with yourself on food that it goes, uh, crazy. You don’t have to be so controlling and having some comfort food along the ways is going to help in your journey as an athlete and just make you smile and have. Yep.
Jane Marshall (00:36:38):
So that means your, you had a healthy dose of chips and salsa after Belgium waffle ride yesterday.
Adam Pulford (00:36:44):
Oh my God. It was the first thing I did. So first I took a shower, then I had chips and salsa. Oh man. Yeah. Well, we’ve been talking about this ying and yang of data in feel. And so I’d say let’s go into, from a training standpoint, when we have athletes that train using data only meaning they, they hang their hat on numbers and nothing else. Do you have any athletes like that? Jane?
Jane Marshall (00:37:20):
Yeah. It’s the people that, you know, will ride around the block a couple of times to hit that exact mileage or that exact, you know, they’re upset when their TSS score doesn’t match, what’s prescribed or, you know, heaven forbid on training peaks, we have a yellow or red day, you know, and that’s kind of, you know, big picture data, you know, or if they don’t hit numbers exactly on a workout and where they become so obsessed with that, that it, you know, they get in their way and maybe they overcook themselves because they’re trying to hit a certain number or they hold themselves back because they’re trying to hit a certain number. And it’s, you know, I love the data. It love it, but I also eat those athletes that become so obsessed. It’s really, it’s good. But sometimes it’s hard to pull them back out of, you know, the head out of the computer, the head out of the garment and had the cycling computer and power numbers and look at the big picture. And I’ve had people so obsessed in. It’s like, okay, well on your ride today, I don’t care what your number is, but I want you to tell me three cool things you see out on your bike to try to break, break that habit or have them put their, their computer in their pocket or tape over their heart rate or, you know, whatever their hanging up point is.
Adam Pulford (00:38:54):
Yeah. Yup. Yeah. And I will say, I mean, it is, is a really cool time to be an endurance athlete or to be an endurance coach, uh, because of all these wearables and power meters and Horry monitors and GPS trackers and AI. I mean, it’s, we have a lot of cool stuff in it and it helps us to do our job better too. And it helps us to do it remotely. Um, so I mean, I’m a huge fan of data. So as Jane in our athletes, I want them to be huge fans of data too, but overdoing it is the problem. That’s the mistake is where they allow the number. They allow the technology to, or to make them not think. And I think that the problem that I’ve seen with athletes like this is it gives them an out when failure occurs, because they say, well, coach told me to do 200. It’s like, yeah, but there was a range on that, right. Or say, you’re in a group. I can go. Coach said, I can’t go that hard. It’s like, yeah, coach really didn’t say that. But they’re, they’re using this number as an excuse to say, not go hard, not do what they want or something like that. Or, um, maybe not have some fun on their ride. Um, when someone joins them, you know, something like that. Yeah. There’s
Jane Marshall (00:40:08):
Always, I mean, you know, we write training programs and it’s never set in stone and that’s something that may, you know, it makes me kind of mad is if everyone thinks that I’m a drill Sergeant and you know, not going out to do ride with a buddy, you’re go to a fun ride because they’ve got some, you know, X and Y on, on the training calendar. I was like, Hey, you know, shoot, shoot me a text and say, I want you to go ride with your friend. We can reshuffle the week. I mean, that’s the whole point of having a coach is to make the training best fit with your life and to keep it fun. Cause if you’d keep all greens on that calendar, you’re not going to have fun. And then you get burnt out and no don’t want to see a bike again, that’d be sad.
Adam Pulford (00:40:53):
Yup. That would, that would be sad. Um, in, in conjunction with that, it’s also like, uh, you know, do say intervals gay cause coaches, we prescribed intervals, right. Not all the time, but sometimes. And when they go and do the intervals in say it’s two Watts lower right. Than, than the prescribed. And when you try to walk through an athlete on an athlete, that is, um, they’re sad about that. They’re two Watts lower on the first one and then the crushed, all the other ones. Right. And this is where I say, you know, perfection is not the goal here. I mean, when you’re outside, you’re in an imperfect world now for inside, maybe a little bit more controllability in there and all this kind of stuff, but like, look at this from a bigger picture view and realize it too artsy. Nothing. No,
Jane Marshall (00:41:38):
You freaking crushed that workout. That’s awesome. And so those perfectionist type a is a lot of athletes we work with and it’s getting them that that’s okay. That’s, that’s good. I mean, every day is there’s going to be a range and life is going to happen. There’s going to be some fluctuation in your numbers and that’s disco out and you know, those people put your head down and, you know, watch for cars, but do your best and have, you know, have some fun. And that’s it. Our job is to kind of walk you through and analyze the results. And it’s so many people, you know, I get the text of, oh, I, you know, I didn’t do well. And I look at the file and I’m like, oh, this was awesome. And you know, sometimes wish they’d wait to come to a decision, you know, until we give them some feedback. So that’s, I’ve got a lot of those, a lot of them.
Adam Pulford (00:42:29):
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I oftentimes will review blocks of data before I’ll read any comments on training peaks. I always do both, but I like to look at data in, have my own interpretation before I read what’s going on. There’s normally there’s, there’s a disconnect there. Yeah. That’s, that’s how I do it. Um, but I do think that how an athlete interacts with their data helps us to coach them better. Because if they are perfectionistic, you can help them. He can help us work through a process of dialing that down. Meanwhile, if we have the opposite end of the spectrum, which is, I call it, they train too much with emotion, then it can help us to turn up 80. Some of the type, a personality that maybe they should have a little bit more of. But Jean advisees, somebody who trains with too much emotion, like what is that, what does that mean to you?
Jane Marshall (00:43:25):
Uh, I’d say like two, like two types of athletes come to mind. So, you know, one is the person who maybe doesn’t have enough or an athlete doesn’t have enough confidence in themselves. So they see the training program and they’re like, and their numbers. And like, I can never do that. And they’re defeated before they even go out or they even try and, you know, coach, isn’t going to put something on there. That’s not achievable. And that’s saying like, okay, you know, a little pep talk before the beach. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Good point there. Yes. I have seen some programs where I’m like, what in the world? I don’t know anyone who could do that, but again, that’s another podcast. Um, anyway. Yeah. So yeah, seeing, you know, the defeated before they even go out. And so that, that mental battle, that emotion, those feelings, you know, maybe a little lack of self confidence and, you know, that’s a different type of coaching than the person who’s obsessed with the data, you know, they’re usually overconfident.
Jane Marshall (00:44:25):
They don’t need a lot of pep talk and, you know, versus the one with the too much, um, or, you know, are they also the, the athlete that, you know, maybe has a lot of stress going on and we’ve all had that point where we get overloaded and you know, sometimes the stress, the training and just snap and crack and can’t do it. Um, so those people and that’s something where yeah, then maybe you don’t need to do that workout. And we go, and we try again another day and the communication on that side of the coaching and training.
Adam Pulford (00:45:04):
Yeah. And those are really, really good points that I didn’t even think of when I came up with this, this NES next big mistake of training with too much emotion. I think those are super valid. And as a coach, you should, and you, and you recognize that right away when somebody needs a little, you know, just a little hand, you know, to pull them up and say, Hey, look, you can do this, right. You can, you can the same power that you held for 20, you can go for 25, you can go for 30. Okay. Here’s how right. That kind of thing. And when I think of train with too much emotion as well, like some of the things that come to my mind are probably sometimes like an overconfidence or no recombinants, meaning, um, I got this, I can handle way more and I’m just going to go up there.
Adam Pulford (00:45:54):
The guy or woman that thinks that they’re doing 400 and they’re only doing two 50, that the kind of thing. And they’re like, no, well that’s offered this kind of, and then, um, they have excuses. The other, I would say are, they don’t want to use any data because they think it’s going to get like into their head and they won’t be able to enjoy the ride fully, but yet they want to know if they’re improving, they want validation of what they’re doing and they want workouts and all this kind of stuff, but they don’t want the data in this. This is this emotional gap that I see with some of these athletes. It’s a, it’s an interesting one. And all, all it comes back down to, I think is, is, goes back to our sleep conversation of you think you’re doing something let’s just either confirm or deny it.
Adam Pulford (00:46:47):
Let’s verify it. And then if not, and then we can make a strategy and it’s up to you, whether you want to go. And then over time, my goal would be to be able to quantify all the data that we can and weather. And then the goal is not to stare at the thing when you’re racing or training. Maybe when you’re doing some long specific intervals, you to look at that thing. But if we can quantify all the data, we can then get a better idea of what your physiological systems are doing, how your fitness is improving, where your performance is out, you know, as opposed to no, I can’t look at the data, you know, and I, and I feel really good today and I’m just going to go for it. And then they go out and they try the hardest workout on, on the, on the week. And they did it on Monday after a weekend. And it’s like, I put it on Thursday for a reason,
Jane Marshall (00:47:34):
Those workout louvers, you know, you know who you are. They make, they make me crazy. Like I’ve, you know, woke up in the middle of the night and shifted a bunch of stuff out on training peaks. And they started doing that too much. And then I lock them in. They can’t move them
Adam Pulford (00:47:51):
Work movers. I’ve never given them a name before Jane,
Jane Marshall (00:47:55):
Do you know exactly who you are
Adam Pulford (00:47:57):
For sure. Sometimes I get on zoom calls with my offense and I’m like, I’m pulling stuff up. Like, okay, sorry, I just got off of a call. I’m like, what
Jane Marshall (00:48:05):
I did not
Adam Pulford (00:48:08):
Like, why would I put it like, am I in there? Like, no, I didn’t do, I didn’t move it. It’s like,
Jane Marshall (00:48:14):
Um, I usually my usually fess up, but I look at it. I’m like, wow, I didn’t do that. Like, I feel like I’m going crazy sometimes. And the small thing, but there’s certain people I lock them and then they have to ask if they can move them. And then I know, and then we can talk about, Hey, this is why I put things in a certain order. Okay. Let’s talk through why you want to move it and, you know, usually brings up other things and oh man. Yup. Yeah.
Adam Pulford (00:48:39):
But, but that, that is the point Jean. Right? Cause whenever that happens, it’s always, it’s always shines a light on me and it’s like, okay, I didn’t describe why we’re doing that on Thursday, undescribed, how fresh we needed to be on that day. Right. And that, and there’s another mistake that’s we can make top 10 coaching mistakes, I think. Yes. That’s one of them. So to kind of, you know, cap those two off and we kind of been, it’s kind of the theme of this whole talk is just, there’s a balance of emotion. There’s a balance of fuel and science going on your feel and data. Um, and that’s where the coaches and athletes need to, um, need to balance that out over time. So things are so fun yet. We’re doing the work. Um, we’re enjoying our rides, but we’re, we’re doing things that are aggressive, realistic, and still moving the needle on fitness and performance. So Jane, should we, should we talk about this little, this thing called a taper when we’re going into events, uh, do you find ever that athletes don’t taper going into a major event, like say Leadville 100, for example.
Jane Marshall (00:49:49):
Yes. My athletes now they all taper. Cause I, cause because I’m because I make them, um, you know, I think half of them wouldn’t, I mean, I think they would just skip it. And part of it is I’ve seen people that they just have this, you know, there’s this anxiety and nervousness around a big race and they want to cram train and we start to associate being fit with being tired. And that’s something that I, I talked to my athletes a lot about when, when we her, and just because you’re not tired, doesn’t mean that you’re not fit and it’s hard. You’ve been working in training doing all this. And all of a sudden the coach is like, okay, and now we’re going to taper. And they’re like, whoa, whoa, what’s going on. This is a big change. And I, you know, some of the best stories come out of what people try to do during tapers.
Jane Marshall (00:50:41):
I mean, they it’s like all of a sudden there’s all this free time and you, and I have to say, okay, just because you have, you know, 10 more hours of free time doesn’t mean that you get a jam pack that full of other stuff. Or it doesn’t mean that, oh, now you’re going to go try your first yoga class or, you know, just the, the stories are endless and yes, you’re, they’re anxious and they’re nervous about their event, but it’s, you know, trying to get them to sit the heck down on the couch and relax a little bit.
Speaker 4 (00:51:13):
Yeah.
Adam Pulford (00:51:14):
Yeah. I always say, you know, now’s, now’s the time to, to read that book, that’s been sitting on your nightstand that you’ve been meaning to, um, you know, maybe do a little bit more work if it’s computer work, all this kind of stuff where you can kind of bridge the gap on that. But you know, at the end of the day, I think the reason why a lot of our athletes don’t enjoy that taper is because people love training. You know, they love swimming, they love cycling, they love running. And so it’s, you know that for our listeners out there from the coaches to you, we don’t taper you because we hate you. We taper you cause we love you. And tapering what’s actually going on is decreased training stress. He did crease training, frequency, volume, and load to therefore get a super compensation from the, all the training and all the fatigue you just induced in order to go better on race day. So it’s a repletion of the glycogen that we talked about. It’s repletion of the water and the electrolytes we talked about. And it is the, what happens in rest, where you get stronger, you tear down your body, you give it rest. It gets stronger.
Speaker 4 (00:52:20):
Yeah.
Jane Marshall (00:52:22):
Yeah. And you can get two to 5% performance improvement if you, if you do it right, that’s worth, I mean, that’s a lot for most of our athletes, it’s, it’s worth it. You know, sometimes it can be a bit of a torture and maybe went to college with Mara Abbott. And that’s maybe one of my favorite taper stories is when she was a competitive swimmer and swimmers do a longer taper. They do a, you know, almost a three week taper for big, for their big swimming events and Mara, I love you, you and we all knew we stayed away cause she was cranky during tapers because we didn’t have that outlet. And we would all give her a wide berth during swimming taper. And you know, it was, you know, still did it because it worked and it is hard. Um, and understand. But yeah, I don’t, I don’t know many people who love it, but it usually it’s worth it on race day.
Adam Pulford (00:53:19):
So what is the coach Jane go-to taper for a one day event where maybe it’s like an epic event, like you’ve kind of gravitated toward a six to 10 hour event one day, what’s it go to table?
Jane Marshall (00:53:32):
So Leadville just happened and say, most of my athletes did about a 10, 10 day taper. So, you know, two weeks, two weeks, 10 days, you know, maybe, you know, short end would be seven days. Um, you know, if there was something else going on that was kind of, you know, hiccup chair training, but you know, usually usually 10, 10 days, you know, two weeks before is that last big, big block of endurance. You know, we do bring that volume way down, do a couple, you know, probably two key, you know, higher intensity workouts, lots of shorter recovery rides, endurance rides, and show up to race day. Ready to go. There you go. I mean, yeah, it doesn’t have to be
Adam Pulford (00:54:20):
More complicated than that. Honestly. Decrease volume keeps some intensity sleep. Get ready to go. All right. Let’s, let’s move on. We’ve got a few more before we round off, uh, run out the time here. So, uh, Jane, do you ever have athletes who start too hard at a race or in training
Jane Marshall (00:54:43):
Is that EV every group ride and not to stereotype, but it’s every, every male in a group ride just starts, starts,
Adam Pulford (00:54:52):
Sorry, male, masters riders were calling you out. So
Jane Marshall (00:54:58):
A percent, a hundred percent. Yeah. Gran, Fondo up that first hill. And you watch, I mean, next time you guys line up, watch, watch how some of the ultra women pace and do do events and you can learn a thing or two, you know, usually on that second climb, all of a sudden you’re starting to get passed by women. There’s a reason cause they didn’t start as hard as you did. They listened to their coach.
Speaker 4 (00:55:20):
Yep.
Adam Pulford (00:55:22):
Yeah. In the will. I’m glad you bring that up because they listen to themselves as well. Like I’m very confident that women are smarter than men. And I’m not saying that just to like be cool and like edgy and all that crap. But like I normally BWR is a good example. Like we start and I probably started a little too hard too. I’m not gonna lie, but I won. There was a, there was like 1500 riders. I’m like, okay, I’m going to get up there. But I usually find myself riding around the top three women. But once, once I find like a tough room, because their pacing is so much better. And then we were in a group with a bunch of guys and we get on a hill climb guys who just like come around and attack. And we would just like, stay steady. We’d reel them back in every time. And then like, we’d come up on the next deal guy would attack. Steve said he reel him back in and this is like women. They hold up better over the long run. Typically if they’re well-trained, they’re smarter and I enjoy riding with them more. And that is just my opinion on my experience doing these events and coaching men and women, hands down. There you go. I said it. Yup.
Jane Marshall (00:56:31):
No, I agree. I mean, we’re all my, my husband’s going to listen to this and he’s going to be like, Jane, you go out way too hard in every race and you know, yeah. I mean in the shorter stuff, but definitely done that. And bill and been guilty of that and racing me, the adrenaline’s going, you get excited and
Adam Pulford (00:56:50):
Well, before, before we go on with that, I want to say one thing, because this is like later my bullet points, but there is a time and place where you need to start full tilt. Cause otherwise, cause yeah, you got go hard like cross country, mountain bike racing, right? No first lap always the hardest. Why? Because you need to get the whole shot. Everybody’s fresh. Everybody’s going, they need, you need to establish your, uh, pacing. You need to get up there and get through the traffic, all this kinda stuff. So the strategy is actually starting to hard. So if the goal elicits that meet your goal, or then elicits that you have to train that way. However, my point is for super long stuff is actually really stupid to do that in an wind for long training or even two hour training, it is better to start a little easier and finish a little stronger because if you don’t go the opposite, meaning if you start too hard, you’re going to burn your matches early.
Adam Pulford (00:57:49):
You’re going to burn your glycogen up too soon and you’re going to increase too much stress, physical stress in cognitive stress before you need to, before that, you know, the, the final, huge hill climb and that kind of thing now in your training, when you start and when you have a, I call it a progressive pacing approach. When you start lower and finish a little harder, you’re also going to be utilizing fat as a fuel source, as well as muscle glycogen. And then as you ratchet it up, you’re going to burn a little bit more glycogen. And in that is also a very good way to build and to, to train yourself for these longer events in general. And then finally, finally what I’ll add here, cause I’m probably like just maybe too passionate about it too, but like get in a warmup before the, before the race or before, even the group, I’d like just ride to the group ride to warm up a little bit more so that you don’t just get out of the car, get with all the dudes and start sprinting. Nope. Nope. I don’t know. I feel like I was just on a soapbox there. Any, anything else you want to?
Jane Marshall (00:58:53):
You’re very, you’re very passionate about that though. It’s yeah. I mean the main thing is, yeah, there’s two, there’s a time and place for both, but yeah, there’s some times where you got to go hard and you got to train that way too for the demands of a specific event. And if you’re going out for some of the longer BWR, gravel stuff, Leadville, whatever, you know, you just can’t go that hard and just blow yourself up. And I talked to my, you know, I’ll give them like, do not go above 250 Watts on that first climb. And you know, then maybe they do two 60, but at least they didn’t do 300 and I can call out, you know, my Ram, my race across America guys. I mean, you’re, you’re racing your bikes across America. And I have to do this for that big, first big climb out of Oceanside. It was like, you cannot go above 300 Watts because you have 12 more days of racing to do. And if you can do, you’re just going to dig yourself into a big hole. And they learned some important lessons this year, this year, especially with the heat and the environmental conditions they were in. Yeah. Um, you know, that’s, that’s a good, then they can use, you know, coach that I can’t go above X power and that, and then maybe they’ll keep it in check a little bit more.
Adam Pulford (01:00:10):
Yeah. And I think that’s good. And going back to like the same example that we just had S using some data as to why the strategy and I’m guessing this is why it is. Cause sometimes, sometimes I will do that too. However, I will, couldn’t connect it with a perceived effort. So I’ll say, okay, don’t go over 300 in, don’t go over in a strong eight out of 10. And the reason being typically that’s about threshold say it’s threshold call 300. And if you start going in blasting off over threshold repeated repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, you’re just inducing more fatigue and more lactate over time. So if you can control that on a solid hill climb, this is why the coach is telling you a number or maybe B maybe two numbers, maybe a wattage in a rate of perceived effort, scale of one to 10, 10 being a max effort. One being hanging on the couch in eight, typically translates to threshold. And so the, this is where you can use the data you can use perceived, uh, effort and awareness, um, in order to achieve that goal. But pacing is huge in, in, and really what we’re, what we’re talking about here is pacing and pacing is an art and you can use science to do that.
Adam Pulford (01:01:25):
Okay. So Jane, do you have anybody who just bought like a $20,000 bike and doesn’t know how to use it?
Jane Marshall (01:01:37):
Well, I have, I have a great story about this. I actually, uh, I have, uh, an Ironman athlete and we’re,
Adam Pulford (01:01:47):
We’re calling this, they don’t know their equipment. This is one of the biggest mistakes. Yeah. I don’t
Jane Marshall (01:01:51):
Know your equipment. And, and you know, we’ll talk about this and I’m, and I’m a hundred percent guilty of this as well. You know, not, not to this extent and have an Ironman athlete. She’s fabulous. I love her. She’s brilliant. Um, I’ve been struggling with a bike sheet. She had bought a year ago, or may, you know, 18 months ago, it just didn’t fit and ended up getting a new bike three weeks before an iron man. Got it fit. It felt fabulous. You know, got some good rides and we’re like, okay, this, you know, bike feels good enough. You can, you know, go race this, you know, we’ve putting enough time, you know, for a new bike that was fit really well to her. And it was similar to a previous wife that she had, you know, went race Ironman, you know, had a pretty good race, you know, not her best, not bad, you know?
Jane Marshall (01:02:40):
Good, solid. We’re kind of talking about some things, you know, kind of race download after in, she starts talking about her oval rings and I was like, you, I was like, wait a minute. I was like, you had rotor rings on the new bike. And she was like, yeah. I was like, you didn’t have those on your old bike. And she was like, no. And I was like, oh man, like, that’s a, that’s even a bigger change than just going on, you know, a new bike with a pretty similar fit to throw in, you know, go on from a standard circular ring to a roto ring, which can take months to adapt to. And I was like, you know, one, you know, I had, no, she didn’t, she had no idea those were on and that they were different. And it was like, okay, pause, send me a picture of, you know, all your bikes. Let’s go through all of your equipment, you know, hands down, you’ve got to pay attention to this. You can’t just rely on the mechanics. Like let’s learn some more and, you know, w w made some decisions or, you know, fix a few things and, you know, but it’s huge. And it probably cost her, you know, I would say half an hour on the bike.
Adam Pulford (01:03:47):
Yeah. Yeah. I believe it. Um, and so for our listeners, yeah, for our listeners listening, who don’t, aren’t familiar with oval rings, um, basically what Jane is talking about any normal chain ring is circular. And if you just picture something that’s more oval, which what the goal of it is to increase power through the downstroke of the pedal and effectively, that actually changes a lot in the pedal stroke from the near muscular standpoint. And so it can really over cook you if you’re not used to it, especially if you’re triathlete, not used to some of that upper end. And in general, it’s not like, and this could be another podcast tube, but it’s not going to, there’s no difference between the two. However, there’s no difference if you’re well-trained with him, there’s a big difference if you’re not trained. So it’s not going to make you faster, but if you do it randomly for race, it’s going to have some big, slower,
Jane Marshall (01:04:43):
It changes your pedal stroke, anything, and then take it, you know, go and run a marathon after. And, you know, it’s, you know, we kind of laughed about it. Um, but one of those, and was there a reminder as a coach, like, okay, even for these athletes been working with for a long time, if some, you know, if they get something new, you know, let’s go through in detail and figure out what, you know, make sure everything’s the same similar, you know, same chain rings. I mean, now there’s compacts, you know, mid compact standard, all that and crank size. I mean, I think we can tell a really good story about you coach Pulford a couple of years ago. Do you remember we’re talking about this? Um, this is a hundred percent equipment and I just remember this, I didn’t even play in this before the podcast.
Jane Marshall (01:05:27):
You texted me. And you’ve been like, I’ve been having issues with my hip, you know? And we’re like talking about stretching. You’re going to tell this aren’t you. Yeah. And you know, you know, body adjustments, stretching, yoga, trying to figure it out. Like what’s going on in like a couple of weeks later, you texted me a picture and it’s like a picture of two cranks, your right. And your left crank arm. And one is a one 70 and one is a 1 75. And you had put on two completely different sizes on a bike and not realized it. And it had been the bane of your existence for a couple of weeks or months.
Adam Pulford (01:06:08):
Well, no, it was actually, it was longer than that. Yeah. It was longer than that. And, uh, here you go, folks, this is Jane going, going for it. Is it true? That is a true story. And I did not catch that. Um, and I will, I will take full responsibility for it. I had sent my SRM in for service and when I got back, I ha I had a few different ones. And then I had like crank arms lane over there. And I think I took, uh, Kristen’s like when a Christian screen current, I put it on and says, run 1 75 on 1, 1 70 on the other one. I’m just like, man, what is going on? I got some issues going on and I have a couple of different bikes and it was only happening on this one bike. And then finally I was just measuring everything.
Adam Pulford (01:06:52):
I’m like, wait, oh my God. So thanks for, thanks for pulling that one out, Jane. Um, but you know, to that end too, I will say, let’s go back to internship days. It was like, uh, oh, coach Adams back working on a bike. Somebody go help him. Cause I was terrible. Like, I didn’t know what I was doing around a bike. Um, like full stop. I had no clue. Like it was hard, like when I got to CTS, um, I couldn’t, I mean, I couldn’t fix a flat quickly. I could fix it. Right. But it, but then like, I didn’t know how to like, uh, you name it, man. Um, change a brake pad in a rim brake bike. I mean, I was very terrible. And so Mike dirt and all the people they love to, they gave me a hard time. However, uh, I was dipped in, in, in the bath of, uh, uh, team directing and had to figure some stuff out on the road.
Adam Pulford (01:07:47):
And now I’m a pretty good hack when it comes to mechanics. Um, but that’s, but now we do it well, except when it comes to putting on crank arms, I guess. Um, but I think, I mean, this is so true and I’ve made a ton of mistakes in this in, but over the past five years stuff’s been changing really quickly, like real rapidly. And so I’m, I’m all for the new stuff. But when it comes to, you know, electronic shifting suspension systems, tubeless wheel systems, uh, disc brakes, gravel bikes, like Crevel bikes, gravel bikes didn’t exist like five years ago. Right. So for those of us in the industry, I mean, it puts an onus on us to know, um, to be equipped, to talk to our athletes, what we’re trying to sell them or push them toward. But then to our athletes just have a very basic idea of what they’re getting into before they start going. So Jane, when they get new stuff now, I mean, after your experience with your, uh, triathlete, do you do anything different when they get a new piece of equipment or how do you manage that situation?
Jane Marshall (01:08:52):
Yeah. And I think a big piece of it is you can talk about things, but you know, I have people take videos or pictures of, you know, new bikes or, you know, try to keep an inventory of, you know, on, on training peaks. They can write down, you know, what they have or into, you know, people changing power meters, like all of a sudden, you know, there’s some changes in power dad and they’re like, oh yeah, I got new power meter. It’s like, okay, let’s, you know, communicate that let’s keep track of these things. Cause there’s always a little variances and everything and it comes out communication and just, you know, talk about it. You know, I’m always Googling things or we’re shooting emails, like has anyone heard of, you know, XYZ wheels or, you know, road tubeless? Um, no. What about this gravel set up?
Jane Marshall (01:09:40):
You know, what tires are people running for this race? You know, having that community and helping the athletes do research and then making sure that yeah, what they’re saying and what they’re, they, they think they’re running is what they’re actually doing. Um, in going through that. And, you know, I would say, um, you know, a lot of our athletes are well off and they have multiple bikes. They keep keeping track of all of that. And, you know, keeping batteries charged, uh, with, especially with the Ceram stuff. I think one of the best hacks I’ve seen is, you know, on a group ride down on Tucson and March is Mari Holden saved the ride by pulling a spare saran battery out of her, uh, Jersey pocket and, you know, learn learning things like that. Like, okay, well that’s a great, that’s a great thing. Okay. And all of my athletes that are running axis, you need to carry a spare battery during Leadville or during your stage race, if something happens, you know? Yeah. They’re fully charged, but it could save your day.
Adam Pulford (01:10:39):
Yeah. Don’t leave home without it, for sure. And bring your charger too. Um, but you know, one thing. Yeah, exactly. The one thing I think for, for me is like, um, I fueled a lot of questions with new, like, uh, wheel entire wheel specs and also tire, uh, air pressure in the, in the tire. And really it’s, it’s gotten pretty complicated. Um, because if for road is not just like pump them high and pedal hard and for mountain bike, it kind of the same thing back when people were running, you know, tubed, and then they went to bliss and it was still a lot of high pressure, but now we have really wide rims for both, for all three, let’s just say road gravel, mountain bike. And you’ve got all these different tire casings in, in width of tires and in Antifa flat protection. And so I think it comes, you know, you want the athlete to become educated on some of this stuff to know what they’re running.
Adam Pulford (01:11:36):
They don’t have to become experts as coaches. We need to know a little bit what we’re talking about, but Ceram came out with a good, um, air pressure or tire pressure calculator. You can just Google it Ceram tire pressure. And what you can do is you can put in your tire or sorry, your rim specs, you can put in your athlete weight in the tires that you’re running the width and all this kinda stuff. And it will give you a range of, um, pressure to be running for whatever it is. And I would save from a very simplistic standpoint, uh, do that. It’s super good. I also did a podcast on wheels. I think it was episode 26. Um, that’s a pretty good one to check out, but everything is moving toward wider in for mountain bike. We’ve been to bliss for a while and pretty wide for awhile. So nothing super crazy there, but road is seeing that a lot. And I mean, it’s pretty normal to be run, you know, seventies, 70 PSI for, um, the new, a lot of new wheels that have wide interfaces and in the proper tires. So it’s, you know, if you’ve bought some new wheels over the past year, do a little research on them because I bet you’re probably over-inflating them. No.
Jane Marshall (01:12:46):
Sure. For sure. And I, and I have some athletes that, you know, like yeah, you know, put some 20 eights on, on the road bike and yeah. Run them at 70, 80, maybe 90, depending on heavy, how heavy they are in, for some reason, you know, a lot of people have been riding bikes for a long time, have a really hard time accepting that. And I’ve sent your podcast to multiple people like listened to that. So that explains it because it’s not as simple conversation and it’s not, you know, run lower tire pressure because I said, so, you know, they, they want to understand, well, why is this changing? And it’s, it’s a longer, more complicated conversation to have. And you know, I pass that podcast onto a few, a few athletes.
Adam Pulford (01:13:32):
That’s awesome. But I think that, and the reason why I’ve spent some time on this as is because it is important for athletes to learn why it is so that they don’t overinflate go out on the bike and throw it into a corner and have a rim, or have a, um, a tire roll off or something like that. I mean that, that can, I’ve never seen that happen, but, uh, they, they put the max, um, PSI on there in, in recommendations for reason. And, uh, so it’s safety right from that standpoint. Um, and then also when you’re running the, you know, when you’re running new technology in general is like, again, don’t be an expert on it, but like identify or start to create new habits on how to manage these systems. Right. So it’s like, uh, if you’re now tubeless, put it in your calendar, like when you topped off your rigor, your tires, right.
Adam Pulford (01:14:28):
Uh, and it should be, I mean, generally speaking, every three to six months kind of depends on how much you ride, what ceiling you’re using, all this kind of stuff, but like putting your calendar, um, getting a chain checker for your chain, just dropping it in and just be like, okay, is the time? No, it’s not the time. No, it’s not YouTube. YouTube is a great way to like learn some of that stuff. Um, and at the end of the day, like just wash your bike, look at it and bring it into the bike shot every couple of months. It could be that simple,
Jane Marshall (01:14:56):
Solid, solid advice.
Speaker 4 (01:14:58):
Yeah.
Adam Pulford (01:15:00):
All right. Jenner, last two. And I’ve been, I promise we will carry this thing home. So, uh, I, I think another biggest mistake is when my athletes, they never do this, but when they don’t tell me really important stuff, Tim, do you have, do you have any athletes that don’t tell you really important stuff? Well,
Jane Marshall (01:15:20):
Man, I, this one, this one is I think the most important to me, it’s just like any relationship you have to communicate. And I mean, I had so many examples of this is, you know, I had someone like a month or two ago, you know, hard training, like, uh, you know, intervals, didn’t go, well, I’m doing prep for my colonoscopy. And it’s like, at this point, almost all of my athletes are going through that. And it’s like, that’s something, that’s a big medical thing. Like you’re not going to be able to have quality training when you’re prepping for a colonoscopy or the day after let’s put that on the calendar and we can work around that. And just, yeah. And peop people are busy things slip through the cracks, but just communicate, communicate, communicate those things. So that’s,
Adam Pulford (01:16:11):
Yeah. It’s, I mean, it’s usually, unfortunately it’s usually communicated after the fact, right? It’s like, you have a problem and they’re like, yo, I don’t know why, oh, I did start this. Or I did start taking that or a change to this. And it’s like, probably should have, probably should have, let us know one, one good example. And I think you, you mentioned this gene is, uh, when, so we, we used to T we’re for COVID all of the things we used to lead all these trips around the world. And one of them was down in Loretta and Chris Carmichael, uh, came along to raise that Loretta. And I think, did he get sick like that? Like the weekend? I think
Jane Marshall (01:16:52):
He’s, well, he, we didn’t know that he had gotten sick. Um, but he Laura’s hot. Right. It’s down in Costa Rica. And the last day is, you know, third day out in the sun and he gets to the last aid station and he passed out.
Adam Pulford (01:17:08):
Yeah. I mean, he was, he was super rough. Like just, you know, it was like, well, like you were actually pretty fit coming into this. Like I was just like wondering, I was talking to he’s like, yeah, I dunno. I thought I was pretty fit too. And, but anyway, keep going, Jay.
Jane Marshall (01:17:21):
Yeah. CA comes out, you know, we’re kind of going through these things. There’s always a doctor on the trip. It turns out he had been taking antibiotics for a sinus infection. And this, I don’t know which antibiotics, but it made him very sensitive to the sun. And we’re in, we’re in Costa Rica, in the sun for eight to 10 hours each day in a rain forest rain forest. And he just, we were like, oh, you know, and he, he didn’t realize, you know, that was one of the side effects, but it’s like one of those things, it’s like, you know, you gotta, you gotta communicate those things. And I think, you know, you and I were leading the trip and we’re like, Chris, you gotta tell us, tell us these things. And you’re going to, well, we felt bad for him. And, you know, he ended up being okay. But even, even the head coach, even the heifer get makes, makes mistakes. Yeah.
Adam Pulford (01:18:14):
Yeah. And that’s an optimistic too. I mean, it’s, it’s um, yeah, I probably would have done the same thing. I mean, but you know, that goes to, again like this, you know, awareness or education of what’s going into your body for first a thing. And I guess the last one that kinda sticks out to me is I had a guy Ironman guy, um, he’s doing like, this is peak events and all this kind of stuff, and I’m super fit going into it. And like just dropped anchor, like middle of the bike texts me. I’m like, what happened? Cause I just, I didn’t have it today. I’m like, dude, we’ve been training like so, well, like you, you are the fittest you’ve ever been, this is incredible. It was like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, go to the next morning. And then he replies back and he’s like, you know what?
Adam Pulford (01:19:00):
I did a juice cleanse two days before the race. Do you think that had something to do with it? He was incredible. I was like looking at my phone and I was like, yeah, I think they did have something to do with it. And this, you know, it’s just a, you know, we get these, we get these wild, you know, wild hair ideas and, and uh, hopefully, you know, if you’re a self-coach athlete or if you are a coached athlete, like you have people like around you that can kind of help you make some of these decisions about like what to do last minute or what not to do last minute. Even if you’re thinking them, please tell your coach. If you have a coach, tell a good friend, if you have a good friend that is doing insurance things just to verify it’s good or bad. Yep.
Adam Pulford (01:19:43):
Oh my goodness. Okay. Jane final one. And thank you for taking all this time. I really do appreciate it. But number 10 of the biggest mistakes that athletes make is too much emotional energy on one day versus a long period of time. And I will say that long period of time is a year. And what I mean by this is I think it’s summarized by a quote or concept is, is that most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year. And that’s, that’s kind of derived from the bill gates, quote of most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. But what this is really referring to is like, everybody’s so focused like the here and now, and I’m going to control that and I’m going to overdue, overdue, overdue, but then they, they lose sight of the big picture. And when you’re, when you’re an athlete, when you’re a coach, you need to keep both the here and now in that big picture, in mind when we’re training and doing things. But I think in getting to this, this point here, or the mistake is when you have a big race or you have a huge training session or something like this is like, you put way too much stock into that. And if it goes poorly, then they identify with that and then it’s all for nothing. Have you ever had an athlete like that, Jean?
Jane Marshall (01:21:06):
No. Absolutely. And they, you kind of goes back to like the conversation we’re having about the data and the emotion and, you know, just because you have one bad workout, doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be able to do your event and your training’s not going to be perfect. You know, we, as coaches, we expect there’s going to be workouts that you’re going to fail on and you’re not going to be able to do because of life. You know, you, you have so much energy to put into your life each day, you know, and that gets taken by family and work and training. And some days there’s more, you can put into training and some days there’s hardly any and you have to, you know, be consistent, you know, you know, talked a lot about that with athletes, you know, over that year, being consistent with your training to build for that goal. You know, but if there’s a day, one day that goes wrong or maybe there’s a couple days I go wrong. That’s okay. It’s not going to ruin, you know, your, your Ironman goals. I can ruin your Leadville. It’s not going to re you know, ruin your Belgium. Awful ride is, you know, step back, look at the big picture. Don’t get so caught up in the small details.
Adam Pulford (01:22:15):
Yeah, that’s it. And didn’t Jean and I have been coached for 16 years plus now I guarantee you, there, there hasn’t been one day of training or even one race for my professional athletes that have made or break them. And even that they’re best for like a professional athlete, you know, a career defining race or a PR for an amateur athlete. It’s, it’s just the sum of so many other training and racing days, and there’s going to be more days to come. And I get it, like, especially if you’re a professional athlete, I mean, it’s, it’s super important to perform. However, you got to realize that you’re not just a race, you know, if you’re a masters athlete or an age grouper, it’s like, you’re just way more than, than that event. The process of training for that event that really hones and develops us as people. And that’s really, I think what I’m about in coaching anyway, is to help you see all the rest of stuff in life while we’re doing fun, biking things.
Jane Marshall (01:23:12):
Yep. It’s about, it’s about the journey.
Speaker 4 (01:23:14):
Yeah. That’s not the journey, that’s it?
Adam Pulford (01:23:19):
Well, Jane, I think, I think we’ll put a pin in it there. I think this is a, you summed it up well, it’s about the journey and in that journey we make mistakes and that’s okay. The big thing is you want to learn from those mistakes and be better because of it. And so, uh, I, I want to thank you for, for jumping on, uh, we’ve. We kind of covered a lot, but, um, all this stuff was, was super good and there’s a, uh, a huge fountain of knowledge, um, on, on that end of the computer. So really appreciate you taking your time to spend with us on the train ride podcast today. No, it’s been fun. Thanks for having me.