Another view on the last Ironman World Championship in Nice

Most of what’s important has been written from the last Female IM WC in Nice, with the spectacular race from Laura, how her mindset and nutrition helped her and much more.

There is one important factor that’s been overlooked. Many pros didn’t line up for the race, as they weren’t in their prime. And here I want to dig a bit on the incentives of professionals, semi-pro and age groupers.

Not saying this was the case with any specific withdrawal, top professionals either go for the podium or rather not go, as it will be demanding for the body and calendar to just go for a finish. Therefore their incentive is to either go all in, to the win, or not at all. This is also seen on their trainings, where some of them have a tailor-made plan to win, and then hold dear trying to survive it, and end up either winning or getting injured. And this goes again to that incentive structure (maximize the probability of a win vs having the lows being lower, instead of maximizing their expected average result). Some amateurs/pro-am/semi-pro age groupers also go with this, with the philosophy of doing the race only race if they can secure the Kona Slot, dropping the races (and registration fees on the way) till they are ready. This is the result of a result oriented philosophy. This all or nothing mentality works if you want to maximize your performance on the short term (ie races won during my prime years) but does not contribute to the long term durability and enjoyment

The rest of the Amateurs, from its Latin origin “Amare” or “to love”, take the challenge and do finish the race, even if they did not had the best build up for the race because, well, we are all humans and can’t always have it perfect, missing their goal for the race. Obviously this is a more process oriented philosophy.

These are two different ways to approach the sport, the first one is a requirement for the professionals, as their job is to win races. But to obtain longevity in the sport and enjoy it, the most recommended way is to enjoy every step and focus on the process of building towards your own goal. You can still fight for your WC slot this way, and see it as a culmination of the process rather than just a binary success/failure season result. There is nothing wrong on trying to beat the next person, but I believe that should be the secondary result of giving the best on the build up to the event.

I see this as giving the wrong incentives, where winning is more important than getting better, than giving the best of yourself against the best adversaries. Winning should be seen as a by product of the process of getting better, which gives this process the whole importance over just one race result.

The heroism-driven society we live in only focuses on the binary win/loose outcome, being a factor contributing on the epidemic of doping the sports world has seen transversally. This I suspect is also the main factor many people drop their sports after their pinnacle, revert to the unhealthy habits of society. But there is a way.

One day we will stop seeing the outcomes as binary win/lose. Kilian Jornet suggests that we should even eliminate the podiums where the winner stands above everyone else. It´s hard to measure effort and will. Unless it’s a crawl like Julie Moss, it is hard to get a nice headline from the measure of effort. That’s the beauty of an Ironman finish line, the age groupers finishing that day transmit their years long effort to the viewers (to get a sense from this I recommend the book Finding my Voice, by Mike Reilly).

I know it is hard to find a balance on aligning the incentives with bringing money to the sport to pay for the race production and for the professionals to live from it, but I believe in order to get sports and healthy life our for everyone and not just the freaks/heroes, we need to understand that not only the first one deserves gold, and that the most heroic efforts might not come from the first but from the middle or last finishers.

Coach thoughts

Many athletes are using cross training across their different sports. It is not hard to see runners who bike or swim almost daily. But we can take this an extra notch deeper.

In his book, Chris McCormack he talks about how he used yoga to increase his arms flexibility to improve his swimming. There are many experts that can help us understand our challenges so we don’t invent the wheel every time. We can tap into music or free divers experts for breathing techniques, open water swimmers for cold adaptation, ultramarathoners for nutrition advice. Some cycling aerodynamic experts were trained with F1 teams, which is kind of amazing.

It is up to you and your coach how much you want to try these different techniques in order to gain an edge. For more on how we dive into cross training at JGAtri, feel free to reach out replying to this email.

Gear Corner

People that know me, know that I like to optimize thing, not only my routine and training but also my bike and its aerodynamic saves on investment. Some people refer to it as watts per dollar.

Here is where I present EZGains wheel cover. It is true, I did not measure the watts saved, but what I can say is that it made me feel flying the first time I raced with it. I have it installed in my old aluminum wheels and they felt top end gear for a tenth of the investment. It was also very stable with the rain, hail and cross winds. If you want to try them, use the discount code JGA for a 10% discount on their website.

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