2021 Season Recap || Lessons Learned

you have finished every year with i'm going to change i got to change i got to get a coach i got to change this i got to change this are you going to change anything dear do you feel like that you are finally on the right path yeah i really don't feel that there's anything to change now nothing i'm gonna keep keep uh investigating of course i believe there's still a little more power on the table there's a little more aerodynamic drag that we can cut on the table but for the most part you know continue to test my nutrition dial that in especially at different temperatures we still have yet to prove ourself in the high humidity environment of kona and when i get there i don't want to be like have any mysteries i want to have these things tested and dialed but otherwise training is good equipment is good nutrition is good everything is is really good there's nothing to change now it's just repetition repetition i need to just log more training time really [Music] every season's the same every season i conclude that i've learned a lot and then i'm excited for next season and this season is no different but this season i feel like i actually made some real progress unlike other seasons where i've reflected back and thought ah next season i'm gonna get it i'm gonna get them next season well this time i'm gonna get them for sure i can feel it is that not a broken record though are you a broker yeah but this time i think it's clear i think it's clear through the performances that i've become okay so i was i've been i've always been a consistent 70.3 racer always and i always scratch my head as to why i've not been consistent in ironmans and now i think it's clear as day well i haven't been consistent at ironmans and i believe that i have um learned the lessons that are required to be consistent and i think i proved that by doing uh four five in a row did i do five in a row four in a row that were good um i feel like that we've almost learned a lesson at every race so you think we could run through your season and probably give a lesson learned at um each race can do my best some of them i don't feel that there was a lot of lessons learned some of them have some very big overarching lessons i started the season at miami challenge miami it's what it was known as then and it was a very technical course for me and i would say in that race the big lesson i learned i learned a couple of things one was that the swimming i had been doing with coach with a with a group listening to your coach doing as you're told i had a really good swim there it started the season off really well that was by probably my best discipline i think for me in that race and then i obviously relearned or continued to progress in the idea that i suck at handling a bicycle and i was able to do no damage on the bike whatsoever make up no time in fact i got out bikes by i don't know three or four guys um and so you know that's not a that's not a great place to be in and so continuing to work on my bike handling to get better in that department will pay dividends in the future yeah galveston is where i started to wonder i had been wondering but galveston is where i solidified the fact that the differential between my training and racing power meter was extreme and so i would train at a certain level and my heart rate would be really low and i'd be like wow i'm getting crazy fit and then i would go to races namely daytona miami galveston and push you know really hard against the pedals relative to myself and what i have been training at and not go very fast and then that's when i kind of realized that power meters there was a problem in my power meters and that's when i switched over and started using i was the beginning of switching over and starting to use more consistent power meter across training and racing st george was a great battle with sam magnus rudy was in it for a bit and back a guard and that was a really fun experience probably one of my most memorable races i've ever done most memorable battles and the lesson there you know once again i just i don't know if there was like a huge overarching lesson that's probably one of the problems with when you win you reflect back and you don't see much negative because you're blinded by winning but with hindsight you know my biking was still extremely weak and things don't happen overnight i had changed power meters to be more consistent in training and racing and that was only like three weeks prior the galveston race so um yeah i mean i can't look back without having the hindsight that i have now because now i see why i was feeling fairly weak and you know basically we start learning the big lessons in the next one iron man cordeline which i've been a broken record talking about how formative coeur d'alene is and will be for the rest of my career but i truly do believe that that was the the turning point in my career i think i forever in iron man racing will reflect back on iron man cordeline 2021 and say oh what a horrible painful experience during but what a great experience after because that's where i tore everything apart that's where i really started to become open in particular to input an insight from the world around me and of course the big overarching lesson there was sodium in particular and how i was lacking sodium in all training racing 70.3s ironmans and how that has been having a negative effect that has well in that race had been my fifth straight walking iron man which was horrible as a professional devotes their life to something but fortunately i did start that investigation i started to consult with various professionals and i had a huge overarching hole in my game that was uh you know detectable fairly easily and that's when we began the journey that i have been on for the rest of those iron mans that i did and and one thing you said before porter lane was all you wanted to do was just do an iron man and be in the mix and finish and be happy because i wanted to have fun i remember i remember the only thing i wanted to do in core day lean was have fun because you feel like that you haven't had a good ironman finish with joy in my heart since when i haven't had a good ironman since really kona 2017 and i wouldn't call that a good one really i would always go to kona so it's 2015 2016 and 2017 i'd go to kona you know basically walk for now in 2017 i just was i was lucky i was in good shape race dynamics the way they played out i was in a state of literally body shutting down truly um but 15 16 i walked and but then i would go to arizona one month later and i'd have a great race i won in 15 16 and 17. and so it would mask the problem i'd be okay that was it i just needed to do some more tt work and now i can do well and it was a misattribution of fixing problems that always show themselves in hot races so i never literally my entire career i had never understood that i am sweating at a minimum of 1.5 to 2 liters per hour and i am losing 1.3 or so grams of sodium per liter so that's 2.6 grams on average and replacing at best uh at two gatorades an hour you would be replacing 1.2 grams and you're losing you know 2.6 so you're half of what you need to be you're way off the mark and the body has a whole bunch of compensatory mechanisms to deal with that but at around five and a half six hours you run out of compensatory mechanisms and you basically shut down it's a fundamental biological limitation that you are not going to overcome with any amount of mental strength and coeur d'alene absolutely started that journey of learning that i had not that i had missed i started doing ironmans in 2010. that race was horrible 2014 it was cold in florida and blah blah blah all my hot ones and even moderate temperature ones i'd done poorly in so rolling from there to the famous tri battle um talk to us about that race try battle really cool experience great to watch yon in action and his team in action i think the big lesson there for me was to just observing yon and how he basically hands the reins over to various professionals in their disciplines and doesn't try and control everything and do it all himself like i had been doing that just really to see it in action and see how well and how consistently he can perform across all distances solidified that from me and that's when i began to model my career after his career in that i am just going to hire experts in all the various fields so that i am at you know expert level knowledge due to those experts uh giving me and and helping me on this journey well copenhagen i yes i made a massive change after try battle um you know i pushed pretty good power and lost five or six minutes and so i was scratching my head a little bit in that department and so we tinkered around with the position and we went to some different pads and different satellite but a bit of a saddle source so i changed saddles um and so you know i think that aerodynamically i cost myself quite a few watts maybe 20 watts in doing that and the big lesson learned there or the beginning of that lesson was uh don't tinker like have your guy who who for me it's ivan o'gorman have him always okay any changes you make because he wouldn't have for instance i went from a ism saddle split nose saddle to a single nose uh where you you know a normal kind of road saddle and what happened is i roll my hips in significantly and come a bit more upright and so you should always have an expert okay the changes you're making and not just make random changes and that was kind of the big one of the big lessons i learned there uh and then um in between uh copenhagen and the collins cup plays a pretty significant role in the rest of this year yeah that was probably i would say that's probably that there's two changes that will go down as the significant changes the sodium the lesson there is the big lesson and then in the collins cup i was absolutely fried i mean i did an iron man and i ran really well right to the finish i ran pretty hard and so i was going out for a bike and i just so happened to see gustav and his brother mccall and i did we just said hi and stuff and they said well what are you doing and i said i'm just going out spin the legs and they were like oh we're doing a workout you want to ride together for a bit and we did a bike workout together it was a lot of fun one of the lessons i learned there or something i observed was that hey it would be really nice to train with people a bit more but then gustav said to me um are you do you have a coach right now and i said no and he said well why don't you be coached by my brother and i thought he was joking and so then for the rest of the week we just messed around every time i saw mccall his brother i said hey i'm just i'm waiting for that training plan how come it's not in my training peaks yet and then finally at the end of the week he said if you're serious let's have a coffee and let's talk about it and so we did and we basically said well let's try it let's have let's see if we work well together and that was that will go down also equally as a very important change in my life and in my career because it you know he said to me do you just want like me to give you some insight look at the training for a little bit and i said no like i'm ready to be coached i don't want to have advisors anymore i want to have a coach now i i'm at a point now i've been doing it for you know almost 10 years that i'm ready to hand over the reins and i trust you and and you write to training and that obviously casts a whole cascade of things occurred when that happened totally different you know training method truly different literally i was training the polar opposite of what i guess science would say is the proper way to be training particularly i could get away with it in a 70.3 but couldn't get away with it the longer i went down that pathway which is i believe why i was more consistent in iron man's early on less consistent in 18 and 19 and i believe that's because the way i was training so that was an amazing just turn of fate really at the collins cup as hard as it was to skip st george 17.3 worlds i love that course i love that place it was the right decision because i was able to get one of the first kona spots but that iron man will go down as the first time i've ever had no lull so things are all obviously moving in the right direction that's a combination of the training that i had been doing a tiny little bit of training coach mccall had me do a literally two week block of actual aerobic upper aerobic intensity work and yeah i mean it's an easy swim you basically can float down the water so i was only a minute down tactically i probably made an improper decision and then i didn't ride with joe skipper and sam long that was probably the end of my race right there i should have done that with hindsight but anyways i wrote nice and steady power stuck to my nutrition had no lull on the bike run same thing pretty chill first half pretty well even splitted the run um and i was able to run into second place um you pushed some really good watts there from there uh you said that you were done for the season um at the finish line uh and because you needed to go and focus a little bit more and find some speed yeah it was very disappointing because i did push really good power and there's two things i learned there that come into play one is how you produce power you have to remember that these are not actually non-drafting races these are semi-draft legal races as the rules stand there's also media vehicles out there these are all things that you can gain an advantage from not unfair it's just the game that we're playing it's better to be realistic and and understand the game you're playing than to be naive and so the tactical decision to let sam and joe go was certainly not playing to my advantage so there was that and then also i pushed good power and didn't you know one would think at 298 watts on a true reading sram power meter you should not be getting out biked by i believe i got out bikes by like eight minutes that's a little ridiculous um and so that's where i really knew i must be giving up there's just no way i can't be giving up time i got all the best equipment but and this is what we learned me the position is extremely important and is worth a ton of watts if it's not even little changes like a saddle and how you sit all have a negative or positive impact on your aerodynamics so yeah so then i was like i'm not doing another race until i go into the velodrome and get some closure on where i stand and we tested a whole bunch of stuff we tested all of my various canyon bikes and we tested you know different positions wider narrower uh reach up down we tested a lot of things i mean i literally spent uh 10 hours actually riding on the velodrome and we concluded that you know i have the best equipment already that's not really a place that we're going to be able to find much anymore you are the problem here you how you ride i ride very the way i ride is unique in that i'm squiggling all over the vise and um saddle has a significant impact on how i sit and then also how i interact with the front end in terms of forward backward has a significant effect on how i interact with the air so for me going to a split nose saddle allowed me to roll my hips out flatten my back a bit and then getting more reach allowed me to flatten my back out more and i don't know like not have as much air coming into my core here and kind of staying in one piece over top so that we haven't we haven't fixed that entirely we're gonna go back actually in january but we at least have pathways that we want to investigate next time we're in there i mean really we only had literally amassed about four weeks of iron man training so in the in the in the world of iron man training when you're doing the training that i had been doing which was never train the aerobic threshold and always train anaerobically four weeks is virtually zero time to overcome five years of that style of training so it's nothing in terms of you know what what can be done so you know the race i didn't have too much expectations i really only had one goal and it was that i hadn't tasted racing in a long time i'd been doing a lot of stuff in my head calculated type stuff but what happened to racing with instincts what happened to just racing and racing really hard for the joy of of pushing yourself really far with no care to what happens i had a lot of fear inside of me in races and so i wanted to overcome fear in that race and that's what i did and i didn't care what happened in fact what happened i deserved to happen which was blow up but at least i got to taste it again and you know i got to see gustav who i believe him and christian are going to be the the very difficult people to beat for many years to come i got to see him firsthand and i got to you know play a role in that race and so that was a lot of fun what's the major overarching lesson to that race i mean to be honest with you uh the shoes that i was wearing i think quite beat me up i was wearing the a6 and they're a hard shoe and my run style i don't necessarily know if i want to wear such a hard shoe i love them for speed but for me i'm not sure that i'm going to make that decision again over an ironman might probably will go with something a bit softer for for subsequent ironmans gustav essentially on his debut nearly broke the iron man world record on a solid course uh were you happy with your performance that was my best all-around iron man performance really i mean by the numbers as well as in terms of you know external performance it was my best iron man performance so i swam the best i could ever swim i can't swim any fa faster than with the front guys it was a long swim so you know generally that type of swim i probably would have done really bad in with my old swim because it's a tough swim it was a lot of currents a lot of chop all these things or things that are not good for a weak swimmer so that was great and then the bike i mean i was absolutely reckless should have sucked wheel i i mean there was really no point in me being on the front to be honest with you when you had a guy like cam wharf in the race i mean this is the unfortunate tactics that come into play in the current state of the game in that race there was literally no incentive for me to be the one pushing the pace on the bike zero i mean i'm confident in my run i would love to go toe-to-toe with these guys i was able to go toe-to-toe completely reckless in every way and so you know tactical things i'm a little upset about that but i went i didn't care about tactics i wanted to i wanted to race it to basically go as hard as i could didn't care and i succeeded in that so yeah i'm very happy with it talk to us about that indian wells that was supposed to be a fun race with me and my buddy bert but uh he bailed on me as usual i mean i can't say it wasn't unexpected but so then here i am left to fend for myself i got all these young itu guys looking to destroy me and i was i was very fearful yes and especially with very little speed work but i guess it's just a testament to how poorly i was training and how much better i am training and that i still did really very little speed work yet i had the best run of my entire career and i think it's a fairly accurately measured course um so yeah i was it was you know would like to have panned out with a real battle i still feel that that uh i would have been in the thick of it regardless of what happened if there if no adversity had happened i'd have been in the thick of it right to the finish i'm very confident saying nah can i say who would have won i can't say for certain but uh you know for me with the training i had going into that that was a huge win for sure because i know when i get you know training a full year's worth of training and not this bad sporadic whatever i had done for most of the year that i'm going to be a lot better than that what was the overall biggest lesson that you learned this year i would say if i hadn't met mccall at uh collins cup and then i had went and did the same season i have had but without meeting him and learning what i know now i would say that i would probably be thinking about retiring right now i would say because these guys are doing things very differently and the what i was doing is probably couldn't be any more opposite to what they're doing and so i would race have raced gustav in florida and i would have finished probably 20 minutes down completely out of contention and then i would have sat here and been crying about it on this camera and saying i'm gonna do this and that and then i would have watched christian and that would have blown my mind and then i would have been like i think it's over guys unfortunately i think i think i missed it i could have won in 17 and i didn't but in meeting mccall and learning what i know now ah it's clear as day you don't know what you're doing you are so backwards how you're training it's comical actually in fact i'm impressed you've been able to do what you've been able to do you've been horrible at ironmans but i mean i'm actually impressed you've even been able to do that well at 70.3s and now with what i know now with the with the people around me who i have around me i'm like i'm going to compete with everyone in the world absolutely just i i can do it you can do it man you're there you have a system it's going to take a while might not happen by saint george might not have a vicona it might take a couple more years you've spent five years training the opposite way and now it might take another year or two training better but you can be a contender on the world stage especially with another six months to 18 months of swim improvements so that's the biggest thing is finding a good coach who knows their stuff who's up on the current understandings current training methods and listening to them and doing as you're told that that to me will have will go down as the fundamental shift that enlightened me and allowed me to believe in myself fully that i can compete with the best guys in the world and that's what i'm going to spend 2022 proving that i can do i've been training like for five years and i am going to fix that and i i believe i believe i can get close and then when everyone's close what what does it boil down to when everyone is playing the same game everyone's training really well what does it boil down to it's a mental game now when everyone's in the same system and understands the same nutritional concepts knows they test the out of themselves they know what's going on under the hood everyone's on the same page we've not all been on the same page undoubtedly john's been on a different page than everyone for for three years undoubtedly the norwegians are now on the same page more people are going to get on the same page and then it's mental and i'm confident in my mental game yeah it's been uh it's been one of those years it'll go down this year's gonna go down as nothing really to like write home about like i didn't have any chain george that was really it that was a fun great great experience but the rest of it was just it's just one of those you know not every year is going to be like ah the bests everything's great you know it was a year well it was a very deeply internal year and so you know i appreciate everyone following along even though i wasn't holding that banner up i was always congratulating the guy who had just held the banner up like seven times or something and that's cool but i appreciate you guys for sticking along i know i'm a broken record i know i say one thing i say another thing blah blah blah i've probably said i learned this lesson 20 times in the past you know what i mean i can't tell you how many times i've done that so i appreciate you guys sticking by me continuing to motivate me to believe in me in 2022 i vow to you all that that will be the year where i will be a professional i admit that i have not behaved as a professional and it's taken me ten years to come to the right conclusions that i am ready to behave as a professional and so 2022 i will be very calculated with where i race the distances the courses that i race because i'm a professional and i only want to win the biggest races in the world and i want to when i'm on that start line i want to truly have a shot and so tune in and let's make it a good year

Channel: Lionel Sanders

Views: 127,530

Keywords: lionel sanders training, lionel sanders coach, lionel sanders training plan, pro triathlete training, pro triathlete, kona ironman, triathlong vlog, ironman vlog, triathlon race week, best triathlon youtube, triathlon vlog, pto, triathlon race week series, lionel sanders vlog, st george triathlon, best triathlon in 2021, half ironman triathlon, half distance utah triathlon, bob babbit, triathlon lessons, triathlon lessons learned, pro triathlon season, triathlon recap

Id: iaIm-eBPgSA

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 24 2021