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Showing posts from June 11, 2017

Boost your pre-race mental game - YOU ARE READY!

When was the last time that you had that one workout when everything clicked and you wish race day was tomorrow? Don't you love it when that happens! But then comes race week - Ahhh!!! Where did that race-ready, everything clicked, workout go? All of a sudden, it's race week and now you have a mix of emotions - many of which make you feel so unprepared.  It’s human nature to doubt yourself to feel like you should have done more. In our always-connected world, it’s very hard to keep things in perspective, especially when it appears as if everyone else is so much more ready than you are.  Regardless of how your training did or didn’t go, it’s important that you adjust your mindset so that you go into your race confident and believing in yourself.  Before every race, you need to believe yourself when you say “I am ready.” For many now successful athletes, they started something before they felt ready. If something is important to you, you will never reall

Seeking bike savvy triathletes

It's hard to believe that in just one week, we will be holding our third Trimarni camp of the year! Ever since we moved to Greenville, SC in May 2014, we have been amazed by our bike-friendly roads and beautiful mountain and farm scenery. Once we started to notice the significant improvements in our overall resilience and endurance thanks to our challenging terrain, we knew that this was the perfect playground for a triathlon camp.....and why have just one camp when we can have three Greenville camps! Our upcoming Greenville camp will span over 4.5 days (Wed-Sunday), with no shortage of swim/bike/run endurance-focused workouts, We have some amazing sponsors providing swag for our campers and we have planned some challenging workouts to help our campers stretch their comfort zones. Like with all of our camps, there will be no shortage of laughs, smiles and a few grumpy moments, with plenty of time to build memories and friendships. The only responsibilities of our campers are t

Is your salad a balanced meal? Tips for constructing the perfect salad.

Almost every day of the week (minus my long workout days), I have a big beautiful salad for a meal. Typically, my salad meal occurs at lunchtime as it is far out between my morning and evening workout, which allows for adequate digestion time due to all of the roughage in the meal. A salad is a super, convenient, easy and affordable way to work in a few servings of vegetables into your daily diet. I won't mention all of the health benefits that come from a plant strong diet but for athletes, vegetables act as a low calorie method to pack in fiber, antioxidants and an abundance of vitamins and minerals into your daily diet, to support proper immune system functioning while optimizing metabolic and hormonal health. When constructing the perfect salad, we must differentiate between eating a salad as part of a meal versus eating a salad as the main component of the meal. As I mentioned above, most days during the week, a salad is my lunch meal but on my longer workout days, when ene

Is your body image limiting your athletic potential?

As an athlete, your closest relationship in life will always be to your body. Your body lets you do so much on a daily basis but you can never take for granted the complexity of the human body and how much it does for you during exercise.  Having said this, your body is going to give you mixed signals - very often. Some days you will feel amazingly strong and other days you will feel blah. Although it is normal to feel a certain way about your body through the highs and lows of training, it's not normal to feel dissatisfied with your body image, appearance and weight, leading you to conclude that losing weight will enhance performance and will make you feel better about yourself and your body. If you are one of the many athletes who experience great anxiety and pressure to change your body to be "more lean" or "more muscular", read on.  Due to excessive media exposure that glorifies lean and toned athletic bodies (often with the aid of w

Avoid junk miles. Train smarter to go harder with quality workouts.

Every athlete is likely to suffer from "junk miles" training as some point in his/her athletic developmental journey. The term "junk miles" can have many definitions. Athletes and coaches often think of the word as something that describes adding extra miles to a workout (or weekly training) solely to reach a mileage target. For example, a workout may read "Ride 100 miles" or "Run 20 miles" or "Swim 4200 yards" - an arbitrary number that should be reached no matter how the athlete accomplishes the distance. Many athletes see every type of workout as beneficial, even the "just complete the miles" workouts as they build confidence. Instead, a better way to describe "junk miles" is an excessive amount of miles that are completed in excess of what is needed to optimize fitness for race day . With this definition, every workout, even the intense, recovery, tempo, steady and long workouts, can fit into the definition