The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Episode 205: Joe Friel on Science-Based Training for Older Athletes - Part 2

July 17, 2024 • CTS • Season 4 • Episode 205

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In Part 2 of our conversation with legendary coach Joe Friel, Adam and Joe discuss four key topics around training for older athletes: Consistency, Intensity, Motivation, and Habits.

IN THIS EPISODE

  •  4 Takeaways for Older Athletes
  • The Value of Consistency
  • The only 3 things an athlete can focus on
  • Intensity - balancing hard days and easy days
  • "Recovery on Demand" 
  • Motivation changes for older athletes
  • Maintaining good habits with age

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GUEST
For endurance athletes and coaches, Joe Friel needs no introduction. A legend in the endurance coaching profession, Joe is the author of some of the most successful books on endurance training, including "The Cyclist's Training Bible", "The Triathlete's Training Bible", and "Fast After 50". He was a founder of Peaksware, creator of TrainingPeaks software. As a coach, his clients have included elite amateur and professional road cyclists, mountain bikers, and triathletes and duathletes.

HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Speaker 1:

From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Music. Now on to our show. Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1:

As I dove into the stuff you preach, in combination with just general training principles, we look at the complications of aging and the trainability of any age. I came up with four things that our audience can really take away. You've actually hit on the first one, and that's be consistent. Second one is keep intensity but increase recovery time. Third one stay motivated. The fourth one develop or keep good habits, If we can swing. To be consistent first, talk a little bit more there. Even though we've touched on it, I do think that this is the greatest asset that any athlete can have. So speak a little bit more to consistency, as it pertains to an old athlete.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, one of my favorite sayings is if you did the wrong workouts consistently, you'd be better off than if you did the wrong. Wrong workouts consistently you could be better off than if you did the right workouts inconsistently. Um, that's how important consistency is. Um, you can do the wrong stuff and come out better just because you were consistent. That it's, it's the bottom line for improvement. In this new book I'm writing, I devote quite a bit to this.

Speaker 2:

That topic alone is how to be consistent in your training, and this gets into lots of stuff. We mentioned lifestyle, or I did earlier. That's really a part of it is your lifestyle. That's what comes down to. Do you train consistently or not? It's not just motivation. Motivation is good and we need motivation. That's not a bad thing at all. But the problem may be sometimes that people's lifestyle just gets in the way. They just cannot train consistently because they just got too much stuff going on in their life.

Speaker 2:

When I take on a new athlete or in the past I've taken on a new athlete um, one thing I always one question I always is how much sleep are you getting? This is very telling for who this athlete is. If I find an athlete who's saying they're getting less than seven hours a night, which is not unusual. I run into that a lot. An athlete's getting less than seven hours a night of sleep. I know there's a problem, and this is really the crux of what we're talking about right here with consistency. What this means to me is the athlete has got too much in their life. They're trying to fit too many things in. The more stuff you got in your life, something's got to give someplace. Where most people take away the time is from their sleep. That's where they cut back on on what they do. Is they sleep less? Therefore, they can do all these other things they've got in their life that they they have going on.

Speaker 2:

When I run across an athlete like that, what I tell them is, if you want to train consistently and you want to improve, what you have to do is have only three things in your life. You can have your family. We're not going to give up on your family because you're trying to become a better athlete. We're not going to walk away from your career. You've been at this for a while Now. Let's keep your career going and you can train. That's it, those three things. As soon as you start adding more things onto this list. Something's got to give, and the first thing is going to be sleep. Sleep is going to impact your consistency. You're just not going to feel like it some days. You're going to be tired, and that's going to impact your decision to go out and work out, or one of these extra things you get in your life besides those three is going to call on you that day to put some time into it. So what we have to do as we age up and sometimes 50-year-olds are the worst problem for this, by the way Because when you're in your 50s, what's happening when you're in your 50s is you move to the pinnacle of your profession.

Speaker 2:

If you're in a company, you're now in management. You're not just now, you're not just, you know, typing on a computer all day long, typing in code. What you're doing now is you're managing the company. You're a big shot and you've got a lot of things in your life, and so these things get in the way sometimes of getting your bike ride in after work, because somebody wanted to talk to you for an hour and a half after work today. So there goes your ride. So you've got that.

Speaker 2:

So 50 year olds are the worst, I found. Once you get into your 60s, typically things begin to cut back. We begin to cut things out of our lives because we realize, you know, life is not going to be forever. I'm now 60 years old. I don't know how much more time I've got, but I need to do more things with my family that I haven't been doing in the past. I need to ride my bike more than I have been doing In your 50s. You're not quite to that decision point yet, so sometimes I think 50 is the most challenging age group there is for the athlete who is trying to train consistently and improve at a level that will bring them to a pretty high performance someplace later in their season.

Speaker 1:

Yeah for sure. And there's two examples right now, two of my athletes One is 45. The other one is 49. It's the same challenges right now. They both want to improve, they're both time crunched.

Speaker 1:

So, overall, when we speak to consistency for both of them, I said, hey, let's take these 350 hours of training that we did last year roughly for both of them, let's increase by 10 to 15%. One of them is doing it very well, the other one is not, and it's exactly why, for the reasons that you said, got the promotion at work. He's in charge of a lot, he's got a family that's still fairly young and he's very active in that, and so we've had to shuffle training down in order to get that done. However, when you're consistent and you've increased total volume, especially over that long time period, no matter that age, you're racking up just time in zone, time in zone, at all the intensities, but especially like endurance, that zone too, and that's going to really move the ship. And that's what we're talking about, about staying consistent over a year, over five years, 10 years, whatever.

Speaker 1:

And then the shuffling of your priorities. I agree. I mean, I've never heard it said any better Family, career, training, and that sets up how you should make decisions about your lifestyle. Whether you go I don't know whether you're involved in all the community activity things, whether you go clubbing at night, whether it was. Whatever it is right If it doesn't fit into those three things. If you want to be good at training and racing, I typically find you need to be pretty focused and you need to align your lifestyle with it.

Speaker 2:

No question. Yeah, um, I've. I've gotten this all the time with athletes. Umes are unique people. They believe they can handle a lot more than what they are already handling. You know, I've had athletes come to me who said, you know, they're wanting to win a podium at the national championship or whatever it may be a very high goal and say you know, I'm thinking about becoming a member of the HOA here in my community so I can kind of help out because they need some help. And you know I'm thinking in the back of my head. That's the last thing you need to be doing right now.

Speaker 2:

If you want to get on the podium in nationals, you do not want to become a politician and start trying to deal with HOA problems. That's going to chew up a lot of your time. You need to cut that out. I hate to say it, but sometimes you just have to say I cannot be involved right now. Let's put this on the back burner until next year. Next year, after you made the podium at nationals, then let's go join the HOA and help them out in any way you can. That'd be fantastic, glad to see you do it, but this is just not a good time for it. Something's got to give someplace and everything's going to give. Your family's going to suffer because of it, your career's going to suffer because of it, your training's going to suffer because of it and the HOA is going to suffer because of it, because you just haven't got enough time to do everything that you want to do. There's only so many hours in the day. Let's spend more of that time just enjoying life instead of doing all this stuff.

Speaker 1:

Yep, yep, agreed, and I think what you just made mention of there too, like the delineation is do you want to be on the podium at nationals? Right, that's a performance goal and that's going to require serious training. It's going to require intensity. So one of my points was let's keep intensity in there. I don't find that my athletes decrease intensity at all, but I definitely shift the days where they do intensity and I definitely shift how we pattern intensity. So can you speak a little bit to what you would advise for an aging athlete of doing hard days and easy days and maybe some patterning that you've found to be successful?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this is. I started working on this idea. It's been more than 10 years ago, especially for and I started working on it because of aging athletes. I've come to realize you don't have to be old to change your training pattern for sure. But one of the ideas I came up with this is back in about 2012,. For older athletes was that they should train on a nine-day week instead of a seven-day week. So they train one day hard and then two days easy. One day hard, two days easy. One day hard, two days easy. That's nine days. That's their week, if you will. And that way they get adequate recovery so they can come into the next hard workout and actually make it a hard workout, a high quality workout.

Speaker 2:

And the problem I ran into with it was those who are like in their 50s and 60s, not retired yet, especially 50s. They couldn't fit into their lifestyle, you know, because they've got to be at a meeting at 7 am in the morning at their job and yet they're supposed to get in a four hour ride that day. So it doesn't work. So I started playing around with it what? But it works very well for retired people if you don't have a job, if you don't have your days kind of laid out for you in a seven-day pattern. A nine-day pattern works really well. You can change. You can do this one day on, two day off thing over and over and over, and it gives you great, great recovery and you come into each of those hard workouts ready to go. But the problem is the is the all the issues that you face with your lifestyle trying to fit around nine days the other. So I'm sort of working on what's how's, what's another way of doing this, and so what I came up with and this really came from looking at polarized research they they never really, you know, know they talk about 80-20, but they never really put it in numbers. What does that mean other than 80% easy, 20% hard. What does that mean in terms of your seven-day week? Because 80-20 doesn't work out in a seven-day week very nicely.

Speaker 2:

So what I started playing around with was 5-2. Five days easy which could include a day off if you wanted to, that'd be one of those easy days and two days hard, and separate the the two hard days by either two or three days. So you've always got a gap between those hard workouts. Uh, so you get a chance to recover before you do it again and um.

Speaker 2:

So I started playing with that and it worked really well for the, for the aging athletes that I was working with, so I decided to start doing it also with my younger athletes and, lo and behold, they got a lot more out of it also. So you know, they got a lot more volume out of this. We can do a lot more zone one, zone two churning, aerobic churning, metabolic churning we can do a lot of that with this 5-2 idea, and yet we can still get in two hard workouts a week, no-transcript. So that's what I do now for all the athletes I work with is we do a 5-2. We do five days a week easy and two days a week hard, and I think it's a good way of making sure the athlete is number one, getting lots of aerobic training and also being able to come into a hard workout and make it really hard.

Speaker 2:

When I had athletes doing three hard workouts a week with only four easy during the week, it didn't work out nearly as well. Sometimes they'd come into a hard day and they were still tired from two days prior to that. I seldom have ever seen anybody come into that same situation now when we have a five, two step pattern. So I believe something like that solves a lot of problems for the athletes and we can get a lot more training done, a lot more quality training and a lot more volume done also because of that. So now I recommend that for all the athletes I talk to.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that that is a wonderful way of doing it. On the podcast, I give a recommendation of you basically have two, maybe three of your highest quality, two or three of your weekdays to be reserved toward high intensity or something that's going to move you forward in fitness. And so my question to you is when we're talking about high intensity and you say two days, would you also have a day in there that is higher volume and maybe like hard but the intensity is lower, or are those two days strictly reserved to intensity?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, those two days are strictly in test. When I say intensity now, uh, with road cyclists for example especially, I'm talking about zones four and five, that's high in testing. Zone three I put a lot more emphasis on that during the base period. In the base period I'll actually train the athlete pure middle four and three, four easy days, three moderately hard days, because they don't really have that problem of really trying to bounce back. Three, four easy days, three moderately hard days, cause they don't really have that problem with really trying to bounce back from a zone three workout, for example. Yeah, so we'll do a lot of zone three stuff, even some below zone, easy zone, moderate zone four stuff in the base period. But once I get into the, into the, the build period, the specific preparation period, now I'm doing five, two. So we're only doing two hard workouts a week and they're high quality. Otherwise they're going to do some long rides. We're going to maintain their aerobic fitness or base fitness that we got established during the base period. We're still going to work on that, but those are not challenging like they were in the base period.

Speaker 2:

The base period you're just doing your long rides for the first time in the season. We're establishing that fitness by the time you get to a specific period of training. You've already got that established now what we're trying to do is maintain it. You don't have to go out and do those grueling hard rides in in low intensities. They're just based on, you know, being out there for four or five hours, whatever it may be at a time, which very few athletes do, but there are some who still do that. That can be done if you've already got that build up originally. Now all you're doing now is maintain it. So I stick with 5-2 once I get into the specific period of training.

Speaker 1:

Yep, I just wanted to point that out because as you're shifting through you know base build and kind of like peak time periods. It's important for people to understand too the intent when we say a hard day, what that means. And there's times and places to kind of block things up three days in a row, even if the intensity is not all that hard. It might be a little the chat, the session might be challenging, but the intensity isn't so much that we're not going to recover fully for the next day. But I would agree five and two golden recipe for when we want a peak fitness and coming on to that kind of race form. So even with that, five and two for 50 plus still works for 50, 60, 70 yearyear-olds.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, no question, perfect, I'm 80.

Speaker 1:

It works for me, one thing that you mentioned, either in your book or some presentation where I was, was recovery on demand, which is also something I do with my athletes. It's a little bit more artsy rather than science. Could you speak to what recovery on demand which?

Speaker 2:

is also something I do with my athletes. It's a little bit more artsy rather than science. Could you speak to what recovery on demand is? Traditionally, what we've done is we've scheduled recovery periods, rest and recovery periods like every second or third or fourth week, so the athlete has a chance to kind of shed some of the fatigue they've built up over the previous period of time and then you're going to be ready to go back into a nice high intensity, high volume training again, following that brief, brief break from training. Um, and so I've kind of looked around at what is a better way of doing that, because sometimes the athlete doesn't even make it to their third week and they're already tired. So you have to kind of like throw in all of a sudden, throw in a rest period for them because they're just carrying too much fatigue and most athletes won't even won't even tell the coach when they're feeling experiencing that. The coach has to kind of like dig that out of the athlete to find out.

Speaker 2:

That's one of the reasons, one of the benefits of face-to-face coaching. Even using zoom, face-to-face coaching allows you to actually see what the athlete is experiencing in their, in their turn. How do they look back in the 80s and 90s, when I was coaching athletes early 2000s, we didn't have anything like that, like zoom, and my athletes were all around the world. I never got a chance to see their faces, never got a chance to see what they were telling me with their body, their body language. You know that, were they expressing fatigue to me or not? They were telling me they felt good and they were ready to go. But sometimes I would doubt that just because of tone of voice. But if I could see their face, if I could pat them on the back and see how, what they're experiencing right now, I could probably do a much better job of making sure they're ready to go. So that, then, brings us to this idea you brought up, which is recovery on demand.

Speaker 2:

If I was coaching a group of athletes face-to-face, I would every day walk up to every athlete, look them in the eyes and talk to them about how they're doing, how are they feeling, and I want to see exactly how they respond to that question. And then I'm going to make a decision right there at that moment, whether or not they need to rest right now or not. Can they go ahead and do this workout today or do we need to start a recovery period. That would be as if I was coaching one-on-one, face-to-face. There's not a lot of that going on anymore. Very few coaches seem to be doing that. We're all using TrainingPeaks, we're all using Zoom, we're all finding other ways to talk with our athletes, which is great Much improvement over when I was doing this back 20, 30 years ago. But we don't get that same reaction, the same sense of what's going on with the athlete. We can't really experience what the athlete's experiencing. We can't see it, we can't feel it. So now we have to leave it up to the athlete to make the decision.

Speaker 2:

So recovery on demand leads up to the athlete. What it says is you decide when it's time to take a break. And that would be the if. If everything else was equal, that would be. The best thing we could possibly do to have you ready to start training again is for you to decide. I need to take a break and I need to take. You know we'll take a break for three days and see how I feel, and at the end of that three days I'll decide whether to extend it or I'm ready to go back to it again, whatever it may be, but I'm doing that based on me, my head, not the coach. The coach maybe give me advice, but I'm deciding when to do this and I would love to have the athlete do that.

Speaker 2:

Problem is, most athletes won't fess up to it. They will not say I'm tired, they will not say I need a break. Um, they're just very reluctant to tell you that. So the coach has to. In in our new modern world of coaching, the coach has to dig that out of the athlete. We have to ask the right questions. We have to really go deep into understanding what the athlete is telling me and take it to a hot to, to an even deeper level than what the athlete thinks they're even telling you. You're trying to get down to their core. Exactly how are they feeling? And and you have to- realize the athlete's going to lie to you.

Speaker 2:

So you have to be prepared for that and just keep on going, just keep digging down into it, and if you can do that then it works really well. For the coached athlete, uncoached athlete, the self-coached athlete it's extremely, extremely difficult to get that athlete to take a break on demand Almost impossible. They will hold out till the very end. Tell you a story about this. I started coaching an athlete. I think it was about 1998. He was a triathlete and he called me one day. I knew who he was, he was a pro. He called me one day and said he'd like to talk with me. So we arranged to get together in a coffee shop. He lived not too far from where I lived. So he came up and we spent some time together, spent an hour together, and what I learned was he was tired and he brought his training diary with him, which is usually a bad sign, except when he was really tired. He wanted to show me something I knew. So I started asking questions and what I found out was he had fired his old coach something like eight weeks prior to when we met and he decided to coach himself, and he decided he could actually make himself a lot better than his coach could. If he just didn't take any breaks from training, if every day was a hard workout, he could be a much better athlete than he was. He was already at the top of the sport. He was chosen by the USOC as the triathlete of the year. He was top five in the world. He was one of the best athletes there was in triathlon at that time.

Speaker 2:

But he decided that he could be even better just by not taking a day off. So for the next seven weeks he had something hard every day. He'd work out with a group of runners who were doing a race like 5k workout one day a week. He did a swim workout with three days a week with a with a master's group that featured really high intensity workouts. He was doing bike rides with cycling groups that were pushing the limits all the time. Every day was a hard workout and he got to the point by the seventh week he was having a hard time getting out of bed. That's when he called me and we met and I knew exactly what was going on. So we started having this conversation just by the tone of his voice and I knew exactly what was going on as soon as we started having this conversation. Just by the tone of his voice, just by talking to him, he was way, way overtrained. He was the most overtrained athlete I've ever come across in my entire career. It was just amazing what he was going through and what he was still pushing himself to try to do.

Speaker 2:

He was in his eighth week and he was embarrassed that he couldn't finish off this eighth week. All he wanted to do was eight weeks of nonstop, everyday hard training. Is now the eighth week and he couldn't hardly he couldn't do it anymore. What's wrong with me, joe? I can't do this. There's something wrong with me mentally. And so I said no, it's not mental, it's physical. And he asked me if I would coach him and I said yes, but you got to do what I tell you and you're not going to like what I'm going to tell you. We're going to take some time off. We're going to stop training for a while until I know you're recovered. That may be. I don't know how long it's going to be. It could be two weeks, it could be two months. I don't know what's going to happen here, because this is this is rare. When this happens, you've pushed yourself to extreme limit. So we started down that path again. That's, that's from that point on.

Speaker 2:

Um, he finally got him back into training again, didn't do anything at all that year. He had a bad season all together. You know, this is top five in the world. He was having a hard time, uh, of staying the top 10. Um, he goes on to the next year. He wins one race Because we changed our philosophy of how to race and he got one race win, which was really great. He was trying for the Olympics and I knew the bottom line there was he was not going to make it. He came close. There were three athletes who could make the Olympics that year from the US and he came in fifth in the in the trial race. So he got close.

Speaker 2:

This is two years after this overtraining bout and he was still experiencing the downside of it. The following year after that olympics, he retired from training, he retired from racing and he still had years. He could have gone on had he not done this to himself. So he ruined his career by in seven weeks. He ruined his entire career as a, as a pro athlete, in seven weeks. That's how important this is. But you cannot make the athlete understand that because they believe it's in their head, as he thought it was, something going on between his ears kept him pushing this last week hard. What was it that he needed to work on mentally to do this? But it was physical, it was all physical just run himself in the ground. So recovery on demand is a great idea.

Speaker 1:

It's hard to get people to do it really hard it is um part of the part of my process in doing it. I'm a firm believer of teaching them how to fish rather than giving them the fish. Teach them how I think, teach them why I do what I do with their training and it typically goes better. However, even when I give a lot of autonomy to my athletes in that way, they still want to check in with me and I think that's healthy. But they've already made that decision in their head.

Speaker 1:

They just need a little bit of confidence in that way and I think it also that speeds up efficiencies on both ends because, as you said, remote-based coach is not in the field with you. You need to be able to make some decisions where I'm not there and we need to be able to trust ourselves that we'd rather underdo it a little bit rather than overdo it by a little bit. That's going to give you greater success in the long run. For any self-coached athlete listening to this, I mean you listen to that story, you listen to my philosophy. It's just like under train yourself by 10% rather than over train yourself by 1%, because the over-training part's going to go real bad.

Speaker 2:

It is. I ran into a coach a friend of mine coach who has a unique idea. Some of us along the same lines as what you have. He gives the athlete seven days of workouts, or whatever it may be, and here's the package you decide when you're going to do them. So from day one he starts giving the athlete control over their program. It's not being dictated to them, they're deciding, making decisions on when to do these workouts. And I think that's a good starting point for getting to the point where the athlete can actually make a decision on when to take a break from training is to give them the opportunity to coach themselves, if you will, to some extent to get the guidance from the coach, but they're now making decisions on their own about when they're going to do those workouts.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, and it's. I think every coach maybe does a little differently. I would say I'm always observing and, but I have a high trust with the athlete and if there's a problem, like I'm all, I'm going to reach out to him If I think that there's going to be a problem, things like that. But I do think that and I don't do this with everyone, but I do think that there's time and place for that, um, especially when you're getting to learn an athlete too and they're trying to learn themselves. So in that way, I mean, we've talked about motivation. Generally speaking, the athletes I'm working with, I don't have to kick them in the butt that much for motivation. They're generally highly motivated, but not always. And if we're staring down the double barrel of aging and all of these things that we talked about, I'll never be what I was in my twenties and thirties. Why am I even here? Why am I even trying to do bike racing or triathlon or running? How do I get motivated through that? How have you motivated your athletes through that, joe?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that can be a problem. I talk about statistics with athletes a lot, all the data that we look at. One of the most important data I look about statistics with athletes a lot, all the data that we look at. One of the most important data I look at them with, or look with them at, rather, is something I call the efficiency factor. It's just a way of looking at how aerobically, how the aerobic fitness, is coming along, and I call that EF. So we talk about EF all the time when we're talking with athletes because it's so critical to their building their performance from the base level on up. But I came up with another idea here not too long ago about EF. It should really be called the enjoyment factor.

Speaker 2:

What I want to find out from you is are you enjoying your training? Are you having fun? If this is not fun, then we need to make a change. Something's not right someplace. What can we do to make it fun for you? Maybe that means you know, athletes like to ride with, especially cyclists like to work out with other cyclists like to ride with a group.

Speaker 2:

Rides are popular because it's a social time for a lot of athletes. It's time to get together and, you know, just have good time. Do we need to do more of that? Uh, do we need something? Do you need a training partner? That's sometimes the thing that gets them motivated. Also, do you need a training partner and somebody that's going to meet you every day, you know, at uh, at the intersection, and it's near your two homes. So if you can do a ride together, maybe that would help you. Or if the athlete doesn't have a coach, one thing I'll recommend doing is getting a coach. That's one of the biggest motivators there is is to have a coach. So if we can get the athlete to realize I'm doing this because enjoyment, it's fun, and then start doing more stuff that's fun within my training, that becomes then, I think, a motivator for keeping the athlete involved in the sport instead of deciding they're going to give up because I'm just not what I used to be.

Speaker 2:

You have to realize that's what's going to happen. The numbers are not going to stay the same as they were when you were in your 20s and 30s. You're not going to see those numbers anymore. They're going to go away by the time you're in your 50s. That's history. Now we're talking about a new set of numbers and you have to be prepared to deal with that new set of numbers and realize this is how you perform right now and there's nothing wrong with those numbers. That can be very good numbers still for your age group. That's that's important.

Speaker 2:

But you've got to. The first thing is you've got to enjoy riding your bike. But you've got to. The first thing is you've got to enjoy riding your bike. You've got to enjoy working out, and if you're not enjoying it, then we need to find something that helps you enjoy it. That's because my job as a coach then is to find this thing that helps you become better at enjoying going for a ride every day. What does it mean? What do you have to do? It's a challenge, I understand, but it's one of the most important things there is is to to keep on doing this for 10, 20, 30, 40 years and enjoy it all the time. Every time you go out you get a kick out of it. I you know. Maybe that means getting a new bike every every year or so to give you something to do to ride, just to kind of keep your enjoyment level high, or training partners or all these other things I mentioned. But you've got to do something to kind of keep the enjoyment high.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, agreed with that for sure, and I think that sometimes it is taking other flares of social, some other challenges. There's always something to work on efficiency factor, smoothing, pacing, all these things. And so I think a coach, somebody who's kind of a third party, unbiased, to look in and just give those slight tweaks at the right time, that's the way to do it for a self-coached athlete. My general advice is, yeah, probably chill out a little bit more, um, do less structure, just do some endurance and give yourself some time away from a high performance or high pressure sort of situation, and that's that's definitely going to help in the motivation side of things. And then start to think big, like, um, you know, if you do love, if you do love riding and racing your bike, book something in Europe, swiss Epic Do different things and different disciplines to start to change it up, because you probably find that it's like oh yeah, I just needed to variety. It's actually a principle of training as well as the spice of life, but it really plays a big role in motivation.

Speaker 2:

Agreed.

Speaker 1:

So my last, my fourth and last one here is keeping good habits. This is the boring stuff. This is the sleep, the nutrition, the hydration, and I think we can. We could probably talk at length as we have, but I was thinking about this too and, joe, you got some personal experience with this. A lot of aging athletes, they may have some major surgeries or injuries. So how do you keep good habits after a major surgery and tell us a little bit about kind of your journey that you're on right now?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, as I mentioned a while ago, adam, that, um, that this is. It's now um, uh, june. Back in april I had two surgeries in three weeks. Um, wasn't any fun at all. It's a very difficult time for me. I wasn't able to ride my bike, lift weights or do anything, and it had been a long time since I've been through a month without doing anything at all. So I got back into it.

Speaker 2:

When I finally was able to move around, I started moving around more. I started walking first. First walk was just around the block and then I started walking farther and farther and farther, until I was walking an hour and a half at a time, several times a week, with shorter walks on the other day. So and I did this because I'm motivated and where does my motivation come from? It comes from a lot of places. It's really hard to define motivation, but I find one thing for me that's motivating is to think that I'm a role model for my family, for my, for my son, for his wife, for their daughter, for my wife, for people around me in my life. I don't know if they're looking up to me or not, but I assume I'm a role model to some extent for people and I try to conduct myself in a way that makes me a good role model. And I will guarantee you somebody in your life and it may not even be somebody you know, maybe somebody that's really a distant person from you at work or someplace looks up to you as a role model. Every person has looks up to you somebody. Every person has somebody looking up to them as a role model. Every person does. That's the starting place. I'm going to be the best role model I can be. That's my role in life. I want to be a role model, for my family especially. Somebody else wants to copy the same things I'm doing. That's great. But my family is where it starts and it's working really well. My family is very active. It's a great family to deal with because we're very active, very active people. We all get along, we're sociable, we have fun.

Speaker 2:

It all starts with, um, having somebody that kind of sets the standard. What is that standard? My son is now 54 years old. Um, he started racing when he was 12 years old. Uh, he'd seen me doing this and he decided to do it. That's great. I didn't tell him to do it. He came to me and said dad, I'd like to do a race, so he did a race. He finished last in the race, 12 years old, but it was no big deal. We didn't care. He was having fun. That's what it was all about.

Speaker 2:

He goes on to eventually win the state championship in in colorado. Junior state championship beats, by the way, bobby julik, who was third on the podium what 1998, I think? Um, in tour de france. And then he goes from there to race in europe. Um, it's after his senior year in high school. He goes to europe Europe races on the US national team, is finally picked up by an amateur team there and then makes it to the pros in Europe.

Speaker 2:

All because I was trying to be a role model for him. I was trying to do things that I knew would be I would like to see him do, and so I focused my life on him and I do the same thing with everyone around me. I focus my life on him and I do the same thing with everyone around me. I kind of focus my life on them. I want them to see me as somebody who's doing the right things, good things, and try to mimic me in whatever way those things may be. However they interpret that, that they keep on doing these things. So we have this great little family because we all see ourselves as role models, and my son sees himself as a role model, my daughter-in-law sees herself as a role model, my wife sees herself as a role model, and we try to help one another as best we can all the way through our lives, no matter what the issue may be. Exercise is just one little part of this.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.

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Adam Pulford

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