Performance Testing for Triathletes

Intro: This is the TriDot podcast. TriDot uses your training data and genetic profile, combined with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you better results in less time with fewer injuries. Our podcast is here to educate, inspire, and entertain. We’ll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches and special guests. Join the conversation and let’s improve together.

Andrew Harley: Welcome to the TriDot podcast! We’ve got a great topic today. There are all sorts of locations that offer performance testing for triathletes. I’ll be asking two TriDot coaches if performance testing is worth our time and money. We’ve got a new coach on the show for this one. New to the show that is, definitely not new to triathlon coaching.It’s TriDot coach Chris Navin, from Chicago, Illinois. Chris has raced over 100 triathlons and 250 endurance races. He is a Kona finisher, a more than 38-time marathoner, he’s got over 20 Ironman finishes to his credit, ranking as high as 9th in the U.S. and 33rd in the world in his Ironman age-group rankings. Chris is a Level 2 USA Triathlon Certified Coach, and Head Endurance Coach of Four Star Endurance and a Team to End AIDS. Chris, welcome to the show!

Chris Navin: Hey gang! It’s an honor to finally be on the show!

Andrew: Also with us is Coach Jeff Raines. Jeff is a USA Triathlon Level 2, IRONMAN U certified coach, and TriDot Master Coach, who has a Master of Science in Exercise Physiology, and was a D-1 collegiate runner. He has over sixty IRONMAN event finishes to his credit, and has coached hundreds of athletes to the IRONMAN finish line. Jeff has been training and coaching with TriDot since 2015. Hey there, Jeff!

Jeff Raines: What’s up Andrew! How’s daddy life?

Andrew: It’s going! I’m Andrew the Average Triathlete, Voice of the People and Captain of the Middle of the Pack. As always, we’ll roll through our warmup question, settle in for our main set topic, and then wind things down with Vanessa taking over for the cooldown. Lots of good stuff, let’s get to it!

Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s get moving.

Andrew: There is literally an endless supply of podcasts out there in the wild. As the medium continues to grow, the joke amongst podcasters is, “Who DOESN’T have a podcast these days?” Personally, I love it. Go ahead, start a podcast, podcasting is fun! But our warmup question for today – Chris, Jeff, what is your favorite non-endurance sports-related podcast to listen to? Coach Chris?

Chris: It’s a tough one, because most of the podcasts I listen to are endurance sports-related. But there’s actually a ton of them. One of my hobbies living here in Chicago is architecture, so I listen to different vlogs and blogs about architecture. I live right downtown, so that’s a big hobby of mine, like the B1M Vlog, that’s one of my favorites.

Andrew: Good! See, we’re already getting a peek into your personal life, just by asking you a warmup question. Good to know that about you, and that makes sense. When I was scouting out your website, researching you for this episode, you’ve got a lot of Chicago imagery built into your website.You’re obviously proud of your roots there. TriDot has a great presence in Chicago, and actually there is a Chicago Facebook group for TriDot specifically, isn’t that right Chris?

Chris: Yeah, I AM TriDot Chicago.

Andrew: Yeah, so if you’re from the Chicago area and you’re listening to this, make sure you’re a part of the Chicago Metroplex area I AM TriDot Facebook group. Coach Jeff Raines, what is a non-endurance sports-related podcast that you enjoy listening to?

Jeff: You know, I really enjoy the Bible Project. Man, they do a great job of providing great content, breaking down the Bible and making it fun, and they also have some video aspects to it as well for YouTube, and they just do a great job. I love it, it’s very entertaining, and that’s probably the most listened-to one outside of training and running-type of podcasts.

Andrew: Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of their material on YouTube and on social media. I was unaware that they had a podcast, so that’s very cool to know. I’ll have to check that out. Jeff, as a family man with the kids, is that a resource you use with your kiddos to share some of those stories with them?

Jeff: Yeah, they do a great job of breaking it down for adults to really understand some of the deep stuff. That, in turn, absolutely makes it all the better and easier as a parent to relay that down to the kiddo elementary level.

Andrew: I will give a shout out, there’s several I listen to depending on the time of year. Ironically, ever since starting a podcast, I probably listen to less podcasts now than I did before having my own podcast. By the time you script a podcast, record a podcast, publish podcasts, you lose some of your personal podcast listening time. But I still have a few that I make sure I get to throughout my month, week, or year. My all-time favorite one, my personal way to stay in touch with my best friends from college, is we have a fantasy football league. Every time the NFL kicks back up, that’s the only league I do now. I’ve kind of moved on from the whole fantasy sports thing except for this one league, since it’s my way to stay in touch with my college friends. Just to make sure I’m competitive and know what I’m talking about, and that I’m consistently doing a good job in that league and not finishing last place, I have a podcast I listen to called the Fantasy Footballers. They’re just three guys, they’re very entertaining, and they just share their thoughts and insights into prepping your fantasy team for every single week, talking through which players might play really well this week based on matchups and this and that, and all that fantasy nerd-dom.

Jeff: It’s a cheat sheet! You’re just getting cheats!

Andrew: Yeah, honestly! Instead of doing a ton of research myself, I just listen to them. They know what they’re talking about, and then I just learn what I can learn and set my lineup, and they go dominate on Sunday.

We’re curious to hear, from you our listener, what is your favorite non-endurance sports-related podcast? I pitch it that way because obviously the TriDot podcast is your favorite endurance sports-related podcast.  If it’s not, just lie to me and tell me that it is. But I’m going to throw a post out to the I AM TriDot Facebook group, asking you, from all the podcasts out there NOT endurance sports-related, what is one that you just love firing up whenever they drop an episode? Let us know in the comments on the I AM TriDot Facebook group. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in 3…2…1…

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There are a number of lab-style performance tests that can give a triathlete insight into different aspects of their body or their performance. Things like VO2max testing, blood lactate testing, VO2 calorie expenditure testing, and more! What is helpful, who should be doing these, where should you be getting these things done, and what do we do with the results once we get these tests? All that and more with Coach Chris and Coach Jeff. Now Chris, it’s your very first time on the show, so before I ask you about the science of performance testing, I want to ask you about you, the triathlete and the coach.  From Kona, to representing Team USA, to Zwift racing, you have loads of tri experience. From all of that, all your time on course, what is maybe your favorite memory or triathlon story to tell?

Chris: That’s a tough one, because I have a lot of races I’ve done. Kona is definitely up there. I call it one of my top five favorite experiences ever.

Andrew: Sure, it’s gotta be.

Chris: Alcatraz was also one of my favorite ones, and Ironman New York City, when they had a one-time-only event in New York, where you swam in the Hudson. But sometimes I just like to share my first triathlon experience. Because I’m not a top athlete, I started as a back-of-the-packer. I did my first triathlon on a mountain bike, and could barely swim, so I was aqua-jogging and backstroking the swim just to get through. But since getting into metabolic testing and whatnot, obviously I’ve focused more on the performance side.  So one of my more recent favorite memories I like to share sometimes, simply because I used some metabolic testing data for it, is I tried to create my own challenge. At the Chicago Triathlon they have what’s called the Triple Challenge, where you do all three events in one weekend.  I came up with my own Quintuple Challenge, where by pacing every race perfectly, I figured out a way to do the super-sprint race on Saturday fast enough to line back up and get to join the last wave, which is on a Divvy Bikeshare – you got your bike provided by the local city bikeshare, so you don’t have to bring a second bike – so I would squeeze out two super-sprints quickly enough within the time span of the one race. Then on Sunday where they have the big race, a sprint and Olympic distance, I did the Olympic fast enough, and I had an entry with our charity team to do the sprint right afterwards, and still try to make it in time to do the very last wave of the day, and do five races in the span of what they typically only allow three for. But the year I was attempting it, they canceled the swim and turned it into a duathlon, and I missed the final wave by just a minute or two. But it’s always fun to take triathlon and try to do something fun with it and enjoy the experience.

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely! So you were really going for five races, and you got four of the five.

Chris: Yeah, so I completed the quadruple, which at least one other person I know of has done four of the Chicago Tri races in one weekend. But the quintuple, doing five, is a challenge that I still have out there, so I might at some point attempt it again if I can get my fitness to that point and get the logistics down to do it.

Andrew: Yeah, please let us follow along if you do that. Please let us capture that journey, perhaps for our YouTube show or something. Chris, very much like Coach Jeff Raines who is also on this podcast, you’ve done studying, you’ve got your specialties.  You’re a certified coach in swim, bike, and run individually. You’ve done spin classes, you’re a TriDot Pool School coach, and most importantly for the conversation today, you specialize in metabolic testing. For that one specifically, what does a coach or a sports scientist have to do to become a metabolic performance testing specialist?

Chris: It’s a tough one, there’s not a typical way necessarily. The main way that a lot of people get into metabolic testing is if you go through an exercise physiology program or exercise science.You have people that come from the university setting get into testing, but they oftentimes have the science background and education background, but not necessarily the experience or the application perspective that a lot of endurance athletes are looking for. So I would say if someone was a sports scientist, they should really focus on using the data, applying it with athletes, learning to coach, and also doing more endurance events themselves. Coaches, on the other hand, if they want to get into becoming a metabolic specialist, I really think they need to focus on what they might NOT have gotten if they don’t have that exercise science background. Just learn, educate your brain, train your brain, try to absorb as much information as you can, reach out to experts of the industry. Because a lot of it, actually for me even when I started getting into it – I really liked the science aspect of it, I had a lot of experience, but it actually took a lot of just doing testing, both on myself and other coaches and athletes. There’s definitely something to be said by the art and science of doing testing, and doing testing well.

Andrew: Yeah, sure, almost like getting a bike fit. There’s numbers and geometries and angles, but then there’s the art of getting the athlete in the right position for whatever race they’re doing.

Chris: Bike fit is the perfect parallel, yep.

Jeff: I think a lot of exercise testing kind of starts out, like you said, in that research setting, that lab setting. They’re using the modalities of performance testing to provide data for the research that they’re partaking in. I think a lot of exercise physiologists in general start off in that realm, then those who understand the sport of triathlon or the performance side kind of veer out of that potential research setting into more of a practical or athlete-type setting, for sure.

Chris: One example I use from my own background – when I have done a lot of testing, I end up getting a lot of athletes from the ultra-distance racing world, like trail running, ultra-distance marathons. But I had never done them. I knew from the numbers what should work for a fueling plan, what should work for a pacing plan, and I had done Ironmans, but I had never done an ultramarathon other than a 50K. So we had one of our coaches, who is also a Ph.D. down in South Africa, he got us interested in doing the Two Oceans Ultramarathon, which is like a 35-mile race. I hadn’t actually trained for it, but I knew my numbers and I said, “Okay, this will be an experiment. I’m going to see if I can take what I learned in the lab and apply it, and see if it actually works.” I paced that race without walking a single step, start to finish, kept the heart rate right where I needed to, and I learned quite a bit from that type of experience. Even though I had done a lot of testing and I had a lot of race experience, I had never done this other type of race. So I think it’s always important, whether you’re a coach or a sports scientist or someone who’s just interested in getting into it, take the data and apply it. Put yourself in a field test environment to build that experience. I think that’s the key.

Andrew: Well, that’s enough about Chris, I want to get into the science here today. I’ve already thrown the words “performance testing” and “metabolic testing” around quite a bit. I’m not a scientist in this area, so I’m probably using those interchangeably and I probably should not, but that’s all right. Chris and Jeff can correct me on that. So Chris, Jeff, what is this? What is metabolic testing? What tests are out there for triathletes to actually potentially do?

Jeff: Metabolic testing involves evaluating a person’s metabolic rate at which they burn calories as energy and use oxygen. There’s many ways you can break that down. RMR is probably one that many use, it’s resting metabolic rate, but it’s how much work your body does at rest. VO2max is a big one, the max volume of oxygen and anaerobic capacity. BMP, basic metabolic panel, that’s bloodwork. You can get bloodwork to see, at a baseline, what’s going on currently. One that I did a lot of extensive work on, back in graduate and post years, is body composition. There are a lot of different numbers and metrics you can gain from those. There’s very basic things to track body composition, for triathletes in particular, rather than just standing on the scale. The weight can stay the same all year, but your body will look a little bit different at different times of the season. There’s Bod Pod, where you sit in this little pod and it measures air displacement. There’s underwater or hydrostatic weighing. The DEXA scan is cool, because I knew which areas of my body had greater and/or less bone mass. I remember on one of mine, the guy in the lab said, “Jeff, don’t be a boxer.” I’m like, “Why? I’m not tough enough?” And he’s like, “No, your ribs, of all of your body, are on the lower end of normal bone density. So be careful, don’t go be a linebacker or something like that.” Little things like that are kind of cool to know.

Andrew: It’s a good thing you're a runner, just an endurance athlete, who doesn’t take shots to the ribs.  Not on purpose anyway, maybe from your kids, I don’t know. Dr. Krista Austin, coming on and talking nutrition with us sometimes, has definitely referred to some of these tests, some of those are getting into body composition and nutrition.  But today we’re really focused on the performance testing that has more to do with your metabolism, the metabolic testing.  If you’re a triathlete, you might see your local bike fitter will offer metabolic testing. You might notice that your local triathlon shop or local running store might offer this. Your local coach, like Chris, might offer this kind of testing. When you see “metabolic testing”, when you see blood lactate, VO2, all these kinds of things, what does this mean? Those are the ones we’re going to really focus on today. But Jeff, thanks for that great list there, because there’s tons of tests out there that people have probably heard of. From these tests that you’ve referred to, what have you personally had done? And probably even more interesting as a coach, what testing do you like to see your coached athletes consider and pay for?

Jeff: Good question.  I use a lot of these modalities to track gains and losses throughout the season, or season-to-season. I use them more as benchmarks. It’s all adaptable, it’s always, constantly changing. Your VO2max from a year ago is not the same as it is now, not even ten weeks ago. Back in grad school I used to do a lot of VO2 testing. We could do this...