 Despite using an 11/23 rear cassette with 39/53 front chain rings for many years, our favorite gearing for racing and training has shifted to an 11/26 rear cassette and 39/53 front chain rings. This set up allows you to keep a higher cadence on hills and prevent that excessive leg burn that can be so detrimental to finishing your race with a strong run leg. On extremely hilly, long-distance courses such as IM St. George, we’ll even use a 12/28 rear cassette. A general rule of thumb is that if there is any question at all – go with the easier gearing.
Long, steep climbs aside, having the larger gears in back can also help save you from that oh-so-annoying shift to the small chain ring when you hit some small rollers or false flat sections. Having the ability to stay in your 53 front ring and get into the 23 cog on the back without crossing the chain over too far can be nice advantage.
One small disadvantage to having a cassette like a 12/28 is that you lose the ability to pedal hard at over 40 miles per hour. I.e. when you’re going downhill. In our opinion that little bit of lost speed on fast downhill sections is more than made up for on the rest of the hilly course.
Continue reading What gears should I use?
No matter your level of experience you can benefit from a positive mental attitude going in to race day. Today we’re simply going to share a great blog written by pro triathlete Heather Wurtele, A.K.A. the better half of Ironmantriathlontips.com. No matter what your goal is, be it for an epic training session, a big race, or an important job interview – find your happy place.
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 Heather here. Has been awhile since I’ve written a blog. In a way it’s a good thing – I’ve been training hard and spending my down time doing stuff like stretching, reading, finding my happy place and generally trying to avoid stressing myself out with triathlon magazine reading, or blog following. I get so competitive and driven that I have to be careful to stay within myself sometimes and just have faith in the work that I’ve been doing. Social media is cool, but I think that we can get a bit scattered by knowing instantaneously that X did an epic ride today or Y did a 7 k swim and oh, shit, I had an easy day… maybe I need to do more…
I just finished reading the fantastic book – “The Perfect Mile” by Neal Bascomb about the quest to break the 4 minute mile and there is a section where Roger Bannister starts working with coach Franz Stampfl that really stuck with me (p.160).
Continue reading The Mental Game
 Three or four weeks prior to an important race we like to make sure our bikes are in fine working order. This generally means putting a little time and money into sprucing them up, but it’s well worth it when you consider how much training has been invested in your race. Our biggest worry on race day is to have a mechanical issue on the bike. We always breath a little sigh of relief when we get off the bike after an incident free ride. Things can go wrong on the run, but most of them are under your control.
The two big bike upgrades we always take care of a few weeks out from race day are new tires and new cables. More often than not the tires we’re taking off our race wheels are still in really good condition. However, they may have small nics in the rubber, or small cracks in the rubber surface or sidewall. Perhaps some of the tubular tape is pealing away from the underside of the tire. It’s best to have a good look at your tires and if you notice anything at all, swap them out. The same goes for clincher tires, check them over and swap them out if you have any concerns about their wear and tear.
We also take out our old cables and put in some new ones. Twice per year we also change all the cable housing to help improve shifting performance. The primary reason for swapping out your cables, however, is to prevent breakage. Yes, we know, how often do cables break? Not often, but with time trial bikes that have shift levers out on the aero bars, and with most new frames incorporating internal cable routing, there is added cable length, added friction inside the frame, and increased wear on the cable and cable housing. If you want everything to work perfectly on race day and avoid any unfortunate breaks or miss shifts, then definitely swap out your cables. Do this at least a few weeks prior to race day, that will give the cables time to settle and stretch a bit. After which you can get a final tune-up and dial in that perfect shifting a few days prior to race day.
Continue reading Dialing in your race bike
We’re not Kona veterans, but in the 4 starts between us we can absolutely, without question, give you the key to having your best race at the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii.
What is it?
Keep yourself from overheating.
It sounds pretty darn simple, but in the ‘heat’ of the moment on race day, you can easily get carried away with racing and forget about keeping your body in control of the thermostat.
Here are a few quick rules to make sure you don’t overheat.
Rule #1. Stay hydrated.
Forgetting to consume water for the first 30-45 minutes of the bike is about the easiest thing to do wrong. You’ve just come out of a 3.8 km swim in the Ocean, you’re raring to go with life-best fitness, people are cheering and all the other athletes around you are hammering through the first 20 km that take place right in the hustle and bustle of town. Calm yourself down, take in some light calories, some fluid to help top up what you lost during the swim, and get yourself sorted for the upcoming 180 km of sun and humidity. On the run, keep drinking as much as you can handle. Here’s another tip on Ironman Nutrition worth a read.
Rule #2. Do not get sun burnt.
Do everything you can to prevent yourself from getting burnt by the sun. Not only will a sunburn cause you to overheat, it’s just plain bad for you. You’re body will start trying to repair the damage caused by the suns rays instead of allowing you to put 100% into your day. If you have fair skin, think about wearing a very thin, white ‘Rash Guard‘. If you keep it wet it will not only protect your shoulders and back from the sun, it will help keep you cool. Or, if you’re against the short sleeve idea, carry a small flask of sunscreen and reapply after a few hours. It only takes a second to get your arms, shoulders and the top of your quads where sun hits directly for most of the day.
Continue reading The Key to Kona
 There are various approaches to fueling your body for an Ironman. We’ve tried them all. From consuming solid foods, liquid meal replacements, taking GasX, using chocolate bars, gummy bears, gels, protein drinks, chicken soup WITH noodles. We’ve tried it all.
Finally, in our last two Ironman events we’ve settled on something that really works for us. Perhaps with time we’ll have to adjust again, but right now we’re golden. Keeping in mind, however, that we’re finishing the event in 8.5-9.5 hours. We’d be interested to hear what others are doing, perhaps those of you looking at the 12-17hr range. That would be a long time to use liquid nutrition so perhaps you find a bit of solid food is what you need. Let us know in the comments!
Regardless of what you ‘eat’ during your race day, there are still some important points to keep in mind.
-Keep track of the calories you put down. 500 calories per hour would be a lot, even for a very large athlete. The lighter you are, the less you’ll need.
-Make sure you’re not taking in too many calories relative to the amount of plain water you consume. Sports drinks have calories too, so be careful what you use to ‘wash down’ your gels.
-Depending on your effort level for the day, you don’t need to take in any fat or protein. This may be different for the 12hr + athlete. In order for you body to process fat and protein into usable calories while exercising you have to be going quite easy. Stick to Carbohydrates (sugars) while putting out a bit of effort.
Anyway, here’s what we do, and it works very well for us.
Continue reading Ironman Nutrition
 For those of you that train and race with a power-meter, you may have thought about holding a specific average power for your given event. There is a lot of talk about trying to eliminate power spikes and hold a steady wattage throughout your race. It makes sense to use your power meter to keep yourself in check if you tend to blow yourself up early on, or are insensitive to how the legs feel when you are pushing too hard. It seems, though, that some folks are taking this to the extreme and really looking to hold the same wattage on a downhill as they are on an uphill, no matter the course. This may work for a flat or slightly rolling type of course (i.e. Kona), but if you’ve got some actual climbing and fast descents to contend with, it’s not the most efficient way of getting the job done.
An example: if your goal is to hold 200 watts you would be far better off riding upwards of 220-240 watts on the uphills and keeping the power output down around 150 watts for the downhills. A 5% increase in output will net you far closer to a 5% increase in speed on a climb than it will on a decent. Say you’re going 60 km/hr on a decent, it would be much harder to go 63 km/hr (5%), than it would be to go from 15 km/hr to 15.75 km/hr (5%) on a climb. At higher speeds you’ve got more forces working against you – friction and wind resistance especially, so the speed gains from higher power output are less.
Continue reading Power Averages
 The last week of before a big race can be one of the hardest for a triathlete to bare. You’ve done all the work, your training volume is way down and you may feel lethargic and antsy all at the same time. This is a perfect time to sit down and spend some time writing mental training notes for your big day. Sometimes we are super prepared on every other front, but we forget to have a concrete set of form cues and positive affirmations ingrained in our brains for easy access on race day. Writing things down in a journal before each race can help calm you down and give you concrete focus points. It is also great to go back and look over what you’ve written post race to see where you may have missed something or where you really succeeded mentally/strategically now that your performance is in the books.
Here are some suggestions for things to write about:
- put down realistic goal times for each discipline e.x.: I will swim 1:05, I have trained well in the pool, my form is improving all the time, remember that last time trial, this is totally within my reach
- write key words for each discipline that help you remember essential form cues or things that make you smile to get thru hard times. e.x. for swimming: “long an strong”, “catch”, “fishy”, riding: “pull up”, “patience”, “I rule”; running: “light”, “quick”, “chest up”, “Kenyans move over” etc… whatever works for you and makes you remember important things.
- don’t write passively, use powerful positive language: I will succeed, I will focus on my form and this will enable me to maintain my speed, my body is infinitely more powerful than I know I just need to be in the moment and free myself to excel, if I feel bad I may just need more electrolytes – do a body scan, I will get through hard times…
- write a newspaper headline about yourself “upcoming age-group athlete sets new bike course record”, “Mother of two conquers her demons”, “Irongeezer takes the day”…
Continue reading Pre Race Mental Prep
 Over the past winter and spring we’ve been playing around with a gluten free diet: going completely gluten free for a few weeks then consuming gluten to see if it really makes a difference. The answer: Yes, but more so in some cases than in others. Turns out that Heather is quite sensitive to gluten and instantly notices basic discomfort from increased bloating, gastric distress, and diarrhea. Those symptoms indicate a lack of nutrient absorption as well and she feels more energetic on a gluten free diet. Trevor, however, isn’t that sensitive to gluten but likes to avoid it race week to limit any potential affects that it may have on his digestion.
If you have any un-explained GI issues, or even just find that you have to take bathroom breaks rather frequently during or right after long runs, it can be useful to try going gluten free. Try two weeks without gluten (you’ll be surprised how frequently it crops up), and then re-introduce pastas and breads (basically anything at all to do with wheat) in the third week. Make some notes in a food log about how you feel and see if there are any changes in your digestion when you consume gluten again. If it doesn’t bother you, then great, but if it does, you can take steps to eliminate a dietary stress to your system. Training and racing is hard on your body – the food you eat shouldn’t be!
Other food items to consider knocking off the shopping list for race week:
Dairy: Consider swapping for Almond milk if you need that bowl of cereal or glass of milk – a bit higher in sugar content, but it’s a great vegetarian source of calcium, protein, carbohydrates.
Peanut Butter: I think we’d all be surprised by the number of people in the world that have a very mild allergy to peanuts. You may not feel it, or even think you have it, but we like to scratch it off the list for a week or so before our ‘A’ race just in case there’s some underlying energy affect. Almond butter, sunflower seed butter, or cashew butter are great alternates.
High fiber items: We’ve never really bothered to alter this much on race week, but do be aware of taking in more than you’re used to. Avocados are very high in fiber, blackberries, raspberries and prunes as well. And of course the high fiber cereals and muffins you may like to snack on.
Continue reading Gluten Free
 This winter has been the winter of a complete nutrition revamp for us (Heather and Trevor Wurtele – coauthors of all posts on the IMTT site). Some race issues that were slowly becoming a trend (in a bad way) had to be changed.
This post is not about all the factors that affect your race nutrition, just the nutrition itself. Specifically, the concentration and dilution of your carbohydrate intake. Okay, we’ll mention a couple issues first. Adequate training being the number one concern – if you haven’t done the work you will fall apart before the finish line, regardless of what you eat. Issue number 2: Pacing. Simply put, know your limits. 50% of the ‘nutrition’ issues in a race are actually pacing issues. You’ve gone too hard on the bike in order to keep up with stronger cyclists, then blow up half way through the run. There’s a reason why more men fall apart at the end of race than do women…and it’s not because woman are tougher, it’s because most are better at controlling their ego on the bike.
With respect to ACTUAL nutrition issues, here’s what we’ve found after talking to many ‘people in the know’. First off, be wary of anything containing complex Fat or Protein (as opposed to nice, easy to digest, amino acids and cabohydrates) making their way into your stomach during the race. Calories from those sources are very hard to breakdown efficiently and can cause some intestinal shut down once the intensity (on the run) picks up. If your race intensity is low enough, you can most likely digest fat/protein properly without adverse affects to your performance. So, if you plan on walking the entire marathon or half marathon, go for it! The other item to consider (as if there were only two!) is how you dilute the carbohydrates you take in. Most drink mixes out there give you a suggested serving like 1 scoop per 12 Oz. TURNS OUT, there’s a reason for that!!! Wow. On our First Endurance EFS drink for example, they say exactly that (1 scoop per 12 Oz), and because they’ve done their research they know that this the optimal dilution for our bodies to process those carbohydrates without leaching water from our cells – therefore keeping you hydrated and fueled properly over an endurance event.
If we look at that EFS drink label a bit further: 1 scoop has 24 grams of carbohydrate. Convert the Oz. to ml (not sure why the United States must use both the metric and imperial system on their labels, seems kinda ridiculous) which gives you 355 ml.
Continue reading Cabohydrates and Endurance Sport
 This tip is for all your family members, and admittedly we may need some help with this one so feel free to comment if you’ve got a tried and true method for spectating.
Items required for spectating:
Lawn chair, blanket, pillow – something to sit on or lie down on
Laptop, iPhone, netbook, other smart phone – something to get online with
Food and water
Money for buying beer, food, coffee, water
Camera
Map of the course
Start list with numbers
A book to read
Binoculars
Noise making device – bell or something to smash together
Flag and sign to cheer on your crew!!
Sunscreen
Stop watch
Skateboard, rollerblades, bike – something to navigate the run course effectively and watch from multiple locations.
Aside from watching your friend or family member come across the finish line, you definitely have to watch the swim start. Don’t even think of sleeping in, 2000 people throwing themselves into the water at the sound of the gun is something that will spark your adrenaline and get you going no matter how tired you are. Getting a good vantage point is hard, though, so stake your spot early and have some binoculars handy.
Continue reading How to spectate an Ironman
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About this site:
These triathlon and endurance sport related tips have been compiled by Heather and Trevor Wurtele over the years of their progression from working age-groupers to full time professional triathletes. Heather is now a 4 time Ironman Champion and top 10 World Championship finisher. Trevor has an Ironman PR of 8:22 and a 2:51 Ironman marathon.
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