Triathlon Success (eBook)

3ATHLETE TYPES

Looking back, I can say what a great privilege and fortune it is to work with so many athletes since 2004. This pool of athletes consists of beginners, overweight people, people with diabetes, youth athletes, and people over sixty, all the way to para-triathletes, Ironman Hawaii participants, amateur world champions, and world-class athletes. Each of these athletes has a highly individual history with unique problems, skills, and abilities.

This large spread alone should demonstrate how different athletes can be. It quickly becomes apparent that universal recommendations or even frameworks that don’t take into consideration individual strengths and weaknesses don’t necessarily lead to success. The athlete should be seen as an individual. Here we do not only consider physiological and training-relevant markers. The athlete’s personality and character play an equally important role.

Over the years, some structures and behavior patterns have repeated themselves in my work as a coach, allowing me to at some point bundle and catalog these characteristics, which have evolved into eight different athlete types. Although these groups include athletes of both genders, I did also put women in a separate group because, as you will see later on, they possess some special attributes. Classification into these different groups should not be viewed as blanket compartmentalization. Rather there are consistently occurring behavior patterns which I would like to share below.

Occupational groups play an important role here as well. Since I am impartial on principle, I hope no reader feels personally offended because they belong to a certain profession or might even feel exposed in some way. Finding yourself in one of these eight groups does not suggest prejudgment or that you have fallen in disfavor with me. I deliberately included these categories in the book to inspire in the reader contemplation of and reflection on their own behavior patterns in the sport.

Here, too, exceptions confirm the rule, particularly because as Karl Heinrich Waggerl once said, “prejudgment is the snooty receptionist in the outer office of rationality.” The following are merely my observations that should be referred to in coaching where applicable.

Working together with completely different personalities makes my job as a coach so interesting. Being classified as belonging to one of these groups does not mean that an athlete won’t succeed, because when one knows, recognizes, and considers the peculiarities of each group, they can be used to achieve top performances and wins. My categorization is intended to show the strengths and weaknesses of the different groups.

3.1The Alpha Leader

The Alpha Leader is almost exclusively male and between the ages of 35 and 55, most often works in banking, law, or from home in an executive position. The alpha leader generally knows only one speed and that’s full throttle. Rest periods, relaxed training, and unloading weeks are not part of his outlook on life. The number of physicians in this group is also alarming. They are largely nonreflective and tend to have only rudimentary ideas regarding performance physiology and training per se.

The Alpha tends to turn every training session into a kind of competition or to draw comparisons to the male genitalia, because if a training session wasn’t painful enough it was, in the eyes of the Alpha, not training but a waste of time.

In group cycling training, the Alpha can always be found in the very front. He can barely tolerate it when an adjacent rider’s front wheel is at a level with his own. The Alpha is the classic front wheel extender who always has to position his front wheel a few centimeters in front of his neighbor’s.

The Alpha generally completes his training too quickly based on the motto No pain, no gain. Due to the overly fast training, the fat metabolism often does not develop optimally, and the maximum lactate production rate (Vlamax) is therefore generally elevated in these athletes, which is in part compensated by a large amount of carbohydrates during training and competition.

This undesirable development of the metabolism results in competitive long-distance results generally being worse than those for mid or Ironman 70.3 distances. These bad results tend to be mistakenly viewed as resulting from training that was too lax in the run-up.

Communication by the Alpha and training documentation in the journal often leave much to be desired. Criticism from the coach is rarely embraced. Listening is not one of the Alpha’s strong suits because he does not like to be told what to do. Fulfillment of the training plan, while almost always too intensive, is nearly 100%.

As a coach, in order to achieve a halfway reasonable training speed, I deliberately set lower speed specifications because I know that the Alpha leader will always have the need to overachieve.

3.2The Counter

The Counter is part of a group that only originated in recent years with the spread of training science topics on social media. The Counter is also almost exclusively male and largely in the age group 18–45. His tendency to evaluate numbers is also reflected in his occupation. Engineers, controllers, and IT specialists make up the bulk of occupations.

The Counter has a very technocratic vision of training. He thinks that training is exclusively subject to certain algorithms and that everything can be planned down to the very last detail based on the numbers. To do so, the Counter has access to nearly all of the measuring devices the market has produced. He collects data and gets entirely lost in the depths of his data sets, but without applying then to the actual practice.

At times, training analysis takes up more time than the training itself. The Counter rarely participated in club sports as a child. He is the classic late bloomer and therefore lacks a certain amount of body awareness. He struggles to assess his training loads without a watch, speedometer, power meter, etc. If a measuring device fails, he quicky loses control and discontinues the training session or competition.

Communication is limited primarily to the exchange and analysis of metrics. For instance, if the side-by-side left/right ground contact time while running is 47.6–52.4, he starts to ruminate. Training specifications are completed meticulously, but in doing so the subjective feeling is ignored, which can definitely lead to non-functional overreaching.

3.3The Social Media Athlete

The Social Media Athlete can be found in both genders and is rarely older than 45. He is not part of a specific occupational group. He is the hipster among the athletes, wears matching outfits from head to toe and in doing so copies the look of many pros. The optics are very important to him and he self-defines by the likes and number of followers on social media. Nearly every training session is documented there and all training is accompanied by a camera.

As up to date as he is in all things fashion and equipment, as unfortunately erratic is his approach to training. Whenever he reads about a new training approach in a magazine, he immediately integrates it into his own training. When he comes across something new a few weeks later, he again immediately seizes on it.

The Social Media Athlete allows himself to be excessively influenced by the things he sees on social media and from other athletes, and quickly jumps on the band wagon of training challenges (Everesting, Zwift-races, streak running, etc.).

There is an above average number of vegans among Social Media Athletes. The Social Media Athlete has trouble developing a good foundation and confidence in his training, which in turn often results in worse competition results. Before a competition, he is often more engaged in posting photos than focusing on himself and his strengths.

When the competition goes badly, he tends to falsely blame external factors such as diet, the weather, etc. With respect to weather, he generally dreads bad weather and rarely possesses training attire for adverse weather conditions.

Unfortunately, his communication is largely limited to social media rather than entrusting himself to his coach.

3.4The Impatient One

Approximately two-thirds of Impatient Ones are male and can be found across all age groups. He does not fall into a specific occupational group.

The term endurance sport includes the word endurance. But while the Impatient One possesses this ability in a physical sense, he rather lacks it mentally. He considers his performance development too slow, and rest periods and unloading weeks cause him to practically lose his mind, particularly if he is also a Social Media Athlete and can see those other athletes that train significantly more than he does.

The Impatient One struggles with admitting to weaknesses and tends to extend training volume by 10–15%. Much like the Alpha Leader, his training plan has to be slightly mitigated so the desired training goal can ultimately be achieved. If that does not happen, the Impatient One has a tendency to get injured.

He abhors mobility and athletic training as he does not recognize the necessity and wants to spend his training time swimming, cycling, or running which, combined with the excessive mileage, results in a higher injury risk.

Once the Impatient One is injured, he very quickly loses his motivation and asks himself whether he wants to continue with the sport. His loss of motivation then tends to vanish pretty quickly, and...