Lets face it, training can hurt at times. That’s no secret. But have you ever stood at the sideline of a marathon and watched the winners run past. Most of the good ones, show no pain. Remember video coverage of Lance Armstrong climbing the mountains in the Tour de France, he didn’t look like it was hurting. But if you look at the power figures he was producing, it had to hurt. Lance was very good at accepting the pain as part of the game.
The world class marathoners are very …

We could walk into any RSL or footy club in Australia at any time of the day and there would be people on the poker machines. The clubs love it, they set the machine so it only ever pays back as much as they want. They virtually set their own profit margin. The punters playing them know they could play all day and never come out in front. But they gamble on someone else feeding the machine and then walking away just before it pays up. The long shot.
In our …

I’ve been an advocate for going with the flow for twenty years. When the body says “I’m too tired”. It’s time to rest. In fact if rest is scheduled into the weekly or monthly plan, episodes of “too tired” are rare. It’s not a perfect world, and often outside committments add to the overall load on the body’s ability to bounce back.
When an athlete becomes conditioned to the training plan, and the body is able to handle the work. The body bounces back from workouts overnight. provided the diet is …

Just about all of us could perform better in races if someone else drove us. If your body was delivered to the race start in good shape (no injuries or illness) and a driver was given that body for the day. Imagine driving a body with no fear of a breakdown. Without any knowledge of how it had gone in previous races. I’m sure in many cases that driver could get a lot more out of that body than the owner could.
When we go to the go-kart track, we pay …

Last night the 2011 second round of the Rugby league, State of Origin was played. Two equally talented teams, the best players in the country. New South Wales had to win, or no-one would have watched the third round. Queensland have been unbeaten for too long.
With their backs against the wall, the New South Wales players were mentally fired up. The Queensland players were committed as well, but not as desperate. The New South Wales players would have gone into hiding had they not pulled a rabbit out of the …

You’ve done all the work, eleven days to race start, what are we going to do now to pass the time. All this spare time we suddenly have on our hands.
It’s too late to get any fitter. Give that idea away. You have a chance now to make up for some of the sessions you may have missed. By forgiving yourself for missing them. They are now the past. Focus on the present and the future will look after itself.
What can you do now, today that will make your race …

Too many of us mess around and let another year slip by. I’m guilty of it myself. Letting things get in the way of what we really want to do.
Among the athletes we all know, there are some who are prepared to do all the little things right. They do the core strength work, they do the stretching, they train when it looks like rain. They do the runs off the bike when it’s 36 degrees.
A year is made up of a lot of nice days when we’d rather be …

Last Saturday Sandy and I attended the wedding of a young mate. He was like, the last tree in the forest to fall. In fact I thought his life was the inspiration for the character Charlie in “Two and a Half Men”
It was a beautiful wedding held on the beach of the lagoon at Novatell Twin Waters Resort on the Sunshine Coast. The weather held out for the outdoor ceremony, it had rained all day the day before and it started raining within half an hour of the ceremony finishing.
It …

Every second counts. This is the second weekend in a row that I’ve been timekeeper, and watched the guys time trialling at Walloon. Even though in last weeks newsletter, I wrote about the differences between the faster riders and the slower ones, I see the same little differences occurring.
Whether it’s a race or a time trial in training, every second counts. A few seconds of rolling “too big a gear”, just not shifting back to a gear where the rider is most efficient, costs seconds. Sitting up and coasting without the …

This morning I woke up before 5am. It’s just a habit, I didn’t have to get up that early but with sunrise coming early, I guess my body clock is locked into the seasons. It was time to get up. I still had a little bit of office work to catch up on after a late start to the week. We spent the week at Noosa watching a lot of friends competing in the Noosa triathlon.
To be honest the Noosa triathlon was a reason to go away for a weekend …