I was recently invited by Brenton Ford for a return visit (see my previous four previous visits here) to the Effortless Swimming podcast on YouTube. If you're not familiar with Brenton, he is a rock star in the swimming world with a following of almost 300,000. His instructional videos break down swim technique so that [...]
One of the first questions that I ask racers and coaches I work with is: Should you race like you train or train like you race? By far, the most frequent response is: You should race like you train. This answer seems perfectly reasonable if you think about it. When you train, you’re relaxed, feel [...]
We triathletes are deep into the 2023 race season with many big races approaching rapidly. For me, those include the World Sprint Championships in Germany in a few weeks, the USAT National Championships in Milwaukee in August, and the World Standard-distance Championships in Spain in September. For long-course triathletes, it might be the World Ironman [...]
You’re probably thinking, “Say what?," Anyone who has ever done a triathlon knows there are only two transitions in a race, the well-named T1 (swim to bike) and T2 (bike to run). But clinging to that outdated belief may hold you back from being the best triathlete you can be. By embracing the fact that [...]
A racer I’m working with recently won the first run of a big race, but he struggled in his second run and missed out on a potential victory. His race day reminded me of a similar experience in my first college carnival as a freshman at Middlebury. I won the first run of the UVM [...]
You might think that a sport psychologist wouldn’t be interested in technology or hard data. Aren’t we supposed to be into mind stuff like thoughts and emotion? Well yes, psychology is very much about the psyche. At the same time, you may not realize that the data that comes out of a modern endurance-sport watch [...]
At this late point in the season, you will have fallen into one of three camps as far as how your season has gone. First, you may be having a break-out season in which you are absolutely thrilled with the progress in your racing and race results. You would be perfectly content if the season [...]
In my last article that, well, focused on focus, I introduced you to what focus is, its value in your triathlon training and racing, common obstacles to effective focus in triathlon, and how your focus style influences your triathlon efforts. This article will get really practical by showing you what you should focus on and [...]
Focus may be the most misunderstood mental “muscle” in the sports world and this misunderstanding can be a real challenge for triathletes. Most triathletes think of focus as concentrating on one thing for a long time. In fact, many years ago, a former world champion told me that she improved her focus by staring at [...]
The Covid-19 crisis has certainly presented me with new challenges in my work with athletes, whether juniors or professionals. It’s as if the pandemic has taken all of the normal challenges that athletes face and turned their volume up several notches. Whether motivation, confidence, fear of failure, expectations, or anxiety, whatever athletes are thinking, feeling, [...]
