Hannah joined to answer some listener questions and review an athlete’s training calendar, but first she transparently shares how she has managed the psychological challenges that came from a result below her expectations and a mechanical at Sea Otter. It’s an incredibly valuable conversation and a rarity to have such open insight into a professional athlete’s mindset like this. I’m sure we all feel a lot of gratitude for Hannah being willing to be vulnerable and transparent!
Hope you enjoy the episode and learn something that will make you faster this week
// TOPICS COVERED
(00:00) Welcome!
(00:40) Training Between Races
(01:34) Mediterranean Epic and Training Insights
(05:11) Cadence and Bike Setup
(08:06) Tucson Training Block
(10:13) Sea Otter Race Challenges
(16:04) Mental Resilience and Moving Forward
(21:29) Upcoming Races and Strategy
(25:48) Listener Questions and Training Tips
(39:28) Building Confidence in Your Choices
(42:02) Managing Social Media’s Impact on Athletes
(49:39) Finding the Ideal Brake Lever Angle
(57:05) Balancing Training and Recovery
(59:24) Optimizing Training for Better Performance
Yay Hannah again! I was really touched by the story of how Hannah dealt with her setback, being real and feeling the feelings, but also zooming out to the bigger picture that it was a moment in an overall happy life. Anyway - how she put it was so poetic.
I believe! I was seriously overtraining during the Great Pandemic, and ended up having a lot of issues because of it, but I’d do it again if I could. Overtraining kept me sane!
Good episode, and I always love a Hannah appearance!
The sleep topic is interesting, but I think it’s most helpful to apply some lateral thinking practices. Yes, overtraining can cause sleep issues, as can inadequate glycogen recovery. However, it’d be helpful to scrutinize wether the athlete has a history of sleep issues, or if they see a correlation with heavy training periods. Although, this athlete might not have periods without heavy training .
Of course, that’s not possible when the athlete is absent like this, but that might be an interesting adaptation to these episodes. Rather than Jonathan speculating one cause, a panel of experts exploring issues with the athlete could be intriguing.
I always love when Hannah is on the show. Keep her coming back as much as you can, please!
I have a comment. I feel like you contradicted your own company a bit when you knocked on the last reader doing two a days by adding an endurance ride alongside his TR workout. You say that adding an endurance ride only conflicts with the training adaptation goals for the day, but this is exactly how your own website says to add volume: How to Safely Add Volume to a Training Plan.
He may be failing to hit the interval targets but you state during the podcast that he had been choosing harder than usual TR workouts. If he has an extra hour on THAT day and not on the weekend to tack on to his longer endurance rides, I feel like he’s doing exactly what the website says (and what I feel like I’ve heard the hosts recommend on the podcast before). This is the first I can recall where you didn’t recommend adding endurance time at any point during the week.
That’s one of the tricky parts of having a large catalog of content while also constantly seeking to gain more understanding and change perspectives with data.
While the approach discussed in the podcast may disagree with that old blog post (will update it), it doesn’t disagree with what our models suggest for this specific athlete (what is covered in the podcast).
If time on any specific day is a limiter, then the athlete can adjust that in their training schedule.
Thank you so much for answering my question! I was shocked and stoked to hear my name come up!
It’s correct that I don’t have 3 hours on Saturday, so I was trying to follow that blog advice. That said, I also was building up to vEveresting, so I wanted long endurance and didn’t mind intermittent riding during the day.
Now, all my races are about 1 hr, so it seems I can focus on hard days M, W, F and easy days Tu, Thurs, with 1-1.5 hr Saturday.
That said, it seems weight lifting was a bit different also. I try to do it M, W, F at least 6 hours from my morning ride. Planning to back off to just 2 days per week. I was just trying to maintain, but the recent add of strength in TR states to only add a set if it’s to failure, so I started bumping up 5-10 lbs and reducing reps to 5-6 (from 8-10). I’m 60kg and do 3 sets front squats 6x 135, deadlift 6x 245lb, dumbbell rows 10x 35lb, side plank 60s, plank 120s, Spiderman pushups 20. This is beyond the TR strength recommendation, and the only reason I’m bumping up is because of the “failure” for recording sets in TR…may not be the best. I don’t care to get stronger if it doesn’t help me on the bike (plenty strong to lift my kids).
Point is, I could move these strength workouts to Tu, Thurs since I have time if I drop my 1.5 hr morning routine ride to 0.5hr. Is that better? Or just leave the ride at 0.5hr as TR AI recommends and reduce the Saturday to 1.5hr (from 3 hr recommend), and keep strength in the afternoon of M, W, or F (hard) (just 2 days, not all 3), or possibly do 1 strength on Saturday.
I am not a coach, and you may be far younger and fitter than me, but your comment sounds like you’re doing 3 days a week of hard rides and 3 days a week of lifting to failure. That would put me on the struggle bus VERY quickly.
I think Jonathan’s advice of making the hard days harder and the easy days easier was spot on. In that sense I would keep the weights on the interval day and then focus fully on recovery for Tuesday & Thursday. I also liked the advice of bumping up the interval day to 90 min and the recovery days down to 60 min. On those days maybe dial down intensity to 50-60% to make sure you are recovering (something like Bald -2 or Bald -1 for example). Doing intervals and weights is a decent amount of training stress so the recovery is even more important on those in between days.
A longer endurance ride would be ideal and probably the one missing component of the plan, but it sounds like you don’t have time available. If you can somehow fit one in every 2-3 weeks (or even monthly) that would be ideal. But we only have the time we have… so that leaves you with a lot of intensity. Which comes back to Hannah’s point, “you aren’t over-training, but under-recovering.”
Just from the quick scroll on the podcast your training looks super consistent and getting up at 5 am to workout is already a win in my opinion. Honestly, your training looks solid already and the suggest tweaks are just optimizing already the good work you are doing.
Thanks for sharing, I appreciate people willing to analyze training and dig into the details of it. Very cool and best of luck to you.
I appreciate Hannah addressing the work she has to do to be able to push past her lower natural cadence. It took me a while to get my inside cadence to feel natural in the 80-85 range. The week before this podcast, I put my cadence meter on my shoe and rode a few days with it to check my outdoor cadence…it’s down to about 70, and climbing not too steep goes into 60s, and even 50s.
I’ve always been a masher, and worked really hard, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, to do more spinning, particularly up hills…but I didn’t push the power enough, and yeah, my ability to spin increased, but my power and speed tanked. So, I resigned myself to mostly do what feels comfortable (it’s pretty flat here), and I can spin when needed to.
But, my legs don’t like to spin very long, even in an easy gear, which has come into play the last couple falls when I’ve gone to N. Ga. to ride some hills. And, my power has gotten high enough that I’ve run out of extra gears on the flats, and my only choice is to turn the legs over faster in top gear (mtb - 32/10). Obviously I don’t regularly do any VO2max workouts. So, I started doing some higher cadence intervals last week, thanks to Hannah’s advice, and am up to 7x3min at 300w already, after 2 sessions, and should be up over threshold (LTHR) next week.
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