There are a lot of clever sayings going around like “Spend it wisely, you only have one chance to spend it”, “He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day” and something about cutting your cloth carefully to make sure it goes the distance. All of these clever sayings have more meaning when you get a bit older.

Younger athletes can smash themselves in training and bounce back to do it again the next day. Even younger athletes are dealing with a finite resource. I have found that athletes in Uni have to have their training volume reduced close to exam time. One year I had five of them get sick out of twelve who were doing end of year exams, and I had reduced their workload by 30%.

I pay particular attention to what’s going on in an athletes life outside of training. This is important. I write a training program suited for a perfect world, where an athlete eats a great diet, takes his/her supplements every day and gets eight hours sleep every night, and a nap on Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately not many have this perfect life. We have to shape the program to fit the athletes life.

If that means doing less training than someone else, but recovering from it well. Well that’s the way it has to be. Recovery is the bit that makes you faster. That’s the part of your season which detirmines whether you stand on the podium in your major race.

I learned a long time ago that I just can not do as much training as some of my mates of the same age. I felt I was soft, or weak or something. I did everything I could in recovery feeding, massage etc. But I could not run the miles the other guys did. In fact in twenty five years of competing in thirty- three Ironman races, and lots of marathons as training, I have never ran more than seventy km in a week. Most preps for IM I’d average 40-50km per week.

Even though I knew a lot of guys who could train more, I was the one standing on the podium in Hawaii. Most of those high mileage guys are gone now. Even when they were in their peak years, I would still beat them in races. I’m sure they trained themselves out of contention.

In 1999, in my first year as a 50-54 in Hawaii, it was my 17th Ironman and I think about my 6th or 7th Hawaii race. I really concentrated on recovery in every session. I experimented with two rest days per week. That year I coached Josie Loane as a U23 Junior Elite competitor. She was a very talented athlete, but fragile. Her previous coach had her with glandular fever and stress fractures. Her and I both trained on a two day on, one day off, three days on, one day off plan.

Josie won the Australian OD Champs U23, and I placed 3rd in 50-54 in Hawaii recording my fastest ever Hawaii Ironman 10.20, with my fastest ever IM marathon of 3.35. Both of us beat athletes who were doing far more training than we were.

These days on Monday and Friday mornings I walk the dogs.  We do a 3km walk down to my wife’s horse paddock, feed the horse and walk back via the local coffee shop. My wife’s new love is her ex race horse, five year old Dolly. This animal is an athlete, she has more muscle in her neck than I have in my whole body. She has a network of veins in her legs that look like the Amazon Delta. She is beautiful, and she loves the dogs and the new owners.

An athlete can gain as much from a long walk than they could by dragging their arse around the River Loop on their bike one more time. My week has two peaks, Sundays and Thursdays, in between it’s mainly recovering from one peak and preparing for the next one.

Of course I train strong young studs a little harder, they can handle lots of work, and they must do the work if they want to stand on that podium. But it doesn’t matter how tough you are, how talented you are, recovery is an area where you stand to gain most.