Improve Your Cycling, Part II

In Part I of Improve Your Cycling, I focused on how to smooth out your pedaling to make you a smoother rider, a faster rider, and a more efficient rider. These are things triathletes should be focusing on all the time, ways to save energy AND go faster. In Part II I want to address…

Improve Your Swimming, with Coach John Abrami

Each of us brings a different skill set to the sport of triathlon, and typically it is that of a single sport athlete. I wouldn’t want to guess the percentages of people that were primarily swimmers, bikers, or runners before they started doing triathlons, but I have a sense that most triathletes were not age…

The Base Phase

January is upon us, hopefully you’ve taken a break since your last triathlon, followed the suggestions I made in Off-Season Training, and are now wondering how to get started on this year’s training plan. The time between now and 2-3 months before your “A” race is the time to focus on building/rebuilding your aerobic base,…

Improve Your Cycling, Part I

Lately I’ve been riding with different groups of riders and it’s been somewhat of an eye opener to see all the different riding styles. Eye opening because I’m seeing so many cyclists that are riding inefficiently and incorrectly, who have clearly not spent much time in and amongst better cyclists to have learned better habits.…

PE vs. RPE vs. AT vs. LT vs. FTP = HUH?

Acronyms, previously the domain of the military, the medical industry, and large businesses, you either love them or hate them. In today’s high paced world of immediate information overload, where phone calls and emails have been replaced by text messages and 140 character tweets, they’re here to stay. The problem is that sometimes we actually…

Off-Season Training

It’s December, you’ve had a long season of training and racing and your last race was in September. Since then you’ve taken a break, signed up for a couple of races next year, and now you’re wondering what you should be doing with your training this month. As this is a transitional point in the…

The #1 Training Mistake

People ask what’s the one thing I can do to improve my times and I tell them that the number one mistake that most triathletes make is training too hard on easy days and too easy on hard days. Simply put, each workout is designed to train either your aerobic or anaerobic system, so you train…

So You Want to be a Triathlete

So you want to be a triathlete, do ya? Do you know what you’re getting yourself into? Let me see if I can describe what you can expect if you’re coming into the sport brand new, i.e., a newbie, or have done a few triathlons with a minimal amount of training or commitment. If you’re…

The Practical Triathlete

So what exactly is a practical triathlete, isn’t that an oxymoron? Can the term practical even be associated with triathlon and triathletes, a sport that requires you to “master” (a loosely used term), three different sports executed back-to-back-to-back? On the surface, I would say no, but let’s look more closely at the word itself, practical.…

Why a blog?

Does the world really need another blogger? Don’t we have enough people with opinions expressing themselves all over the media saturated world we live in already? In a word yes, and I won’t be offended if I don’t have a large following of people hanging on my every word. This blog is for me, to…