As I mentioned on my last post I have been busy with coaching, answering emails and now reading resumes. I thought picking our elite team was tough but that was because I had never had to read over 100 resumes to pick one only person. Holy selection process Batman! But I got a little time so I hope you find my post informative.
Thinking is so much faster than writing, if someone else could just write what I thought about, it would be great. Surely there would be a lot more blog posts. I can see how famous or rich people have writers. They just think out loud and someone else writes. Nice! Maybe one day eh? Every once in a while something happens and I wish I had time to sit down and write about it for the blog. Writing is fun particularly when one is inspired.
Right now I am inspired to write about all the junk people write about. For goodness sake! Lately I spent a little time reading a few articles about topics that I feel I know quite a bit about and from reputable sources. What a bunch of crap! I read a nutrition piece where someone suggested that you guys train with figs for calories. Then some other guy suggests you use your power meter to pace your race. Honestly my blood pressure was going up. I had to stop reading. No wonder we are growing and I can not seem to find free time for my blog. With people like that as competition for us there is no other way for our business to go but up. Maybe I should not be complaining. The more people struggle to get better and the more our athelets don’t it will be easy. The word gets out.
Then one day I got an email from a tri web site asking us to write articles because they need training articles. I asked him for some topics and they never got back to me. Then a few weeks ago Mark was commenting about the topics he was being asked to write about. Not the most appropriate topics apparently. This brings me to the conclusion that there is just too much junk out there. Too many people that should not be writing or perhaps being forced to write about something they should not write about. Web sites and magazines feel compelled to have new stuff often in order to keep readers and viewers coming back. Even I find myself unable to come up with something to write about. This of course happens when I have a little time to write. Some sort of Murphy’s law applies there I think. Bottom line, just because it is in print or on a popular web site it does not mean it is right or applies to you and your situation.
Over the past few months during my camp, answering emails or posting on our forum I had to answer questions that started with “I read in so and so that ….” Sometimes the topic is all messed up, sometimes the whole thing is wrong and sometimes it is a plausible situation. But one thing that has to be kept in mind is that training for triathlon is like a puzzle with many pieces. Some of the pices are endurance, speed, strength, pacing, periodization etc. Although all these are separate they also combine into one methodology and fit into one puzzle. We at MarkAlenOnline have our puzzle with our components. That is to say we have our training methodology. Other people have theirs, some hideous and some are solid. But irregardless you can not take one’s person speed piece and plug it into our puzzle. That is one of the problems with articles on the web and in magazines. They are just a little piece in some puzzle. Would you buy one piece from many puzzles and try to put them all together. That may be harder than me reading 100 resumes. So next time you read about some new technique, some new finding and its benefits. Ask yourself what puzzle is this a piece of? If you can not figure it out then post it on the forum. Oh no! That means more work. Got to go!
Oh yes speaking of puzzles. Can anyone look at the picture above and guess where it is, what year, who are the athletes shown including the half hidden one and what place they finished. If you get them all I will give you one free peak performamce or maintenance credit for your program. I would give it to the first two people to get them all correct. Your post will have a timestamp so this will be easy to track.