Triathlon Training's Biggest Lie: More Is Better

TriDot Podcast Episode 347
Triathlon Training's Biggest Lie More Is Better

Carrie Tollefson: Hey everybody, welcome to the show. Today on the podcast, we are talking training volume. How much training do we actually need? Can less be more? Is more always better? This is a big-time topic for runners and triathletes, and so we've made it a TriDot and RunDot episode today.

Andrew Harley: That's right. Carrie is here from the RunDot Podcast, and I am here from the TriDot Podcast, and you're here as an endurance athlete who likes to train and race. Our expert today is Jeff Booher. He's the founder and CEO of Predictive Fitness, the company behind TriDot and RunDot. And Jeff, for this topic, I've got my coffee here, so I'm alert and ready to learn. I made a cortado, so it might not be big enough. I should have gone bigger. But how are you today, Jeff? You ready to share?

Jeff Booher: I'm doing fantastic, yeah. I love the topic. It's certainly the rage out there. People have a lot of opinions, so I'm ready to dig in.

Carrie Tollefson: Okay, well, as always, we start with our warm-up questions, so we're going to start there. Then we're going to move into the main set, learning all kinds of cool things from Jeff, and then we're going to ask Jeff an audience question on the cool down. Lots of good stuff today, so let's get after it.

Announcer: This is the TriDot Podcast, the triathlon show that brings you world-class coaching with every conversation. Let's get started with today's warm-up.

Andrew Harley: As sports fans, we all have athletes and teams we love to love, and we all have teams we love to hate. For today's warm-up question, what athlete or sports team do you most enjoy rooting against? Who do you like to see lose? Carrie, over to you first.

Carrie Tollefson: This hurts my mom heart. Even when I'm at the--

Andrew Harley: You don't dislike anybody, Carrie. This is a hard one for you.

Carrie Tollefson: I don't. I really don't. I have a hard time cheering at Little League when we get a hit and the other team doesn't. But I'm going to go. So I'm from Minnesota, as those of you who listen to our pod, you know that I have this Minnesota accent, and I have to say it. Growing up, we do not like the Packers. I love the Packers when they aren't playing the Vikings. But when they're playing the pack -- or when the pack is playing the Vikings, sorry, you got to go. You got to go.

Andrew Harley: Carrie, I'm curious -- so right now, at the time we're recording this podcast, NHL is in its playoffs, and Jeff and I are Dallas/Fort Worth, so we're Go Dallas Stars, and the Minnesota Wild just beat the Dallas Stars in the playoffs. Do you follow hockey at all?

Carrie Tollefson: I haven't gotten to watch any, because the Timberwolves are also in the playoffs right now. So if I'm going to stay up late for one night to watch the Wolves, I watch the Wolves. But I do love the Wild as well. And yeah, they're playing well. They lost last night though, when we were recording this, the morning after a big loss. So we got to get it back. I know. I know.

Andrew Harley: All right. Jeff Booher, what sports team do you love to root against?

Jeff Booher: Well, let's start by -- I think I can communicate it best -- my 2 favorite college football teams. Fightin' Texas Aggies, of course, that's where I went. The other is whoever's playing the Texas Longhorns. So, that's my second favorite team, whoever that is. So I really like the Longhorns to lose. I actually, from our high school -- I'm here in Texas -- Southlake Carroll High School, we've had a lot of our high school athletes go play at Texas, so I'm secretly rooting for at least them individually, to have some great stats if they don't win. The further they get in the season, I want them to do well. But it's just fun. The rivalries go back a century or more, so that's fun.

Carrie Tollefson: That is cool.

Andrew Harley: Great answer, Jeff, and a very Texas Aggie answer from you. I, Jeff, I'm kind of with you. I'm not a massive college football fan to be honest. There isn't a team that I'm like, “Ah, go ‘so and so,’” but I do follow it, just as a sports fan. And what drives me bonkers about college football is the fact that every year you have a handful of teams that, just because of who they are, are like number 3 in the rankings for no good reason. And so really for me, I love seeing the big names in college football lose. So when Ohio State loses, that's great. When Georgia loses, Alabama, Notre Dame, Texas -- I'm with you, Jeff, Texas -- the schools that are always rated top at the start of the season just because they're so-and-so and they have coached so-and-so and quarterback so-and-so. I like seeing chaos in my college football. I'm always rooting for the underdog. Honestly, this last season where Indiana won the whole thing, that was the dream for me, to see all the big names go down and some middle of the road school wins the whole thing. So yeah, that's my answer here. If you're a fan of -- what my mom calls them, the “Good Ol’ Boy” programs, in college football. If you're a fan of a Good Ol’ Boy program, I like seeing your team lose. So we're going to throw this question out. Go ahead, Carrie.

Carrie Tollefson: I think it's funny that we all went to football, too. Why did we all choose football? I don't know.

Jeff Booher: I know.

Andrew Harley: We did, we did. Very American of us.

Carrie Tollefson: I guess. I guess.

Andrew Harley: Sorry, international audience. Very American of us. I'd love to hear, Jeff, Will Usher answer this question and probably get a soccer or football answer. Anyway, we're going to throw this question out to our audience, so make sure you are following RunDot and TriDot on the social media accounts. We'll post this question there. If you're watching us on YouTube or Spotify, you can answer in the comment box right below. What team do you like it when they lose? What team do you love rooting against? Go join in your TriDot and RunDot app. If you're a RunDot and TriDot athlete, go join the podcast groups on there in the social feature. And I'm going to pose this question to you on there as well. Can't wait to see what team you like to root against.

Announcer: Let’s go.

Carrie Tollefson: Let's move into our main set. Jeff, you ready for it?

Jeff Booher: I am, I hope.

Carrie Tollefson: So today, we are getting into something that I see -- at every race that I work and every group that I go to, everyone wants to talk about what they're doing in training, how much they're doing. More hours, more sessions, more miles. The bigger the training the week, the more committed they feel as athletes. That is the belief, I think, across endurance sports. So is more better, Jeff?

Jeff Booher: It can be. But the whole -- I understand where athletes come believing this. Most athletes believe this, that more is better. Just simply: they do more, they're going to get better. That's the best way. You train and you just automatically get better. So the hidden question, though, is about how athletes feel about it. It's more of an emotional-psychological, and a lot of athletes use weekly volume as a proxy for their dedication, and their commitment, and their seriousness as an athlete, and they associate those two things. And so it's not even the logical, “Is training better?” but it is this connection of proxy. The bigger the number, the more they feel like they're a real athlete and that others will see them that way, as well. So the pushback isn't so much that more is wrong, necessarily, and it often does produce results. So when you go from less activity to more activity, you're going to get better. The problem is that better training -- not just more training, but better training -- produces more results in less time with less injury risk. And that's what we do. RunDot, TriDot -- it's better results in less time with injury risk. So it's about the optimization. The belief itself isn't entirely false, that more is better. It's just inefficient. The gains aren't automatic. Just because you train more doesn't mean you will get faster. And it's certainly not optimal. I think a big component is the mental shift. That how you train is far more important than how much you train. So that's not just a slogan that we use, but it's actually measurable, provable, and the data is unambiguous. So more is better. It's been around a long time, but it's the modern version of a very old belief. I know that sports culture and fitness in general, it used to be, do you just chase harder? You remember, “No pain, no gain.” I mean, it's going all the way back to the 70s, 80s. There's no pain, no gain. Every workout has to be hard. If it's not hard, it's not worth anything. Well when that broke, that athletes didn't just lose the obsession, they just simply redirected it. So ‘no pain, no gain’ is now ‘more is better.’ And so it's just a different obsession and the same simplistic mindset that drives athlete behavior. So just remember that how you train is far more important than how much you train.

Carrie Tollefson: Is it wrong for us to think more is better? I think that's maybe how I should have posed the question. Do you think it's wrong?

Jeff Booher: Yes, actually, I do, to associate that way, because it's just inaccurate. Again, it's not that you can't get some better results. You can get some improvement from increasing volume, but it's just a false premise, a false framing of volume. So for most endurance sports history, the training metrics and athletes would focus on and they would measure our accumulation metrics, hours, miles, minutes, sessions. And that was the easy thing, historically, to track. If that's what you track, then that's what you managed. And athletes would naturally manage what they measured. And that volume was one of those things that they measured. It was one of the only available metrics, and volume just became the goal. So you get more of what you measure. So if you keep focusing on volume, then you start making correlations, and assumptions, and beliefs. And that's what you drive for, is just more volume for volume sake. So aside from TriDot and RunDot, other platforms and coaches still default to accumulation metrics. That's how they talk, and the framework, and the way they see the world, because that's the way they were architected as an app or a platform. They're architected to track these accumulation metrics. And then even the coaches are hardwired as they came up over the years with methodologies like that, that are just volume focuses. So coaches still default to that, in large part because they don't have the tools to do anything different. So RunDot and TriDot are powered by FitLogic, and they're the only platforms that are measuring and prescribing the actual things, the metrics that drive adaptation the best. Other platforms, the ‘more is better’ is what gets reinforced. Training apps focus on weekly volume, even on social. Like Strava, you're going to post your mileage, you're going to share your hours, and volume becomes how athletes signal their commitment to other athletes. And there's also the correlation effect. The highly, pro athletes, elite athletes are doing a lot. So all the age groupers think, “Oh, I got to do a lot, and then I'm going to get better. I'm going to be like the pro, because I train a lot.” And they see the correlation, but that's not necessarily causation. Sure, training volume does go up, but it's not the goal itself. And then that social, I think the praise and the social reinforcement is the biggest thing. That runners, they'll post 50-mile weeks, and they get all this praise and kudos during training. And then another runner that's doing 30 or 40 miles, they're doing the right work, but they're not going to get the same level of kudos in the moment. But they're going to get their reward on race day. So training for applause, and training for performance, they're not the same workout.

Carrie Tollefson: Right.

Andrew Harley: Yeah, Jeff, before you hired me, out of the television world, when I worked in TV at the same network, I was the staff triathlete. Everybody knew, oh, Andrew does triathlon. And there was a girl on our team that was a big-time ultra runner. And she would, I would always talk shop. And one day, she followed me on Strava, and so I followed her back. And you know Strava, there's certain tabs that have all these different stats, and you can go see, it'll show you at the end of the year how many miles you ran that year. And for me, it was always, I swam this much, biked this much, and usually my running mileage was somewhere around 500 to 600 in my triathlon training, training for three sports. And I pull up this girl's Strava, just to see, oh, what is she doing in her training? She ran over 2,500 miles in one particular year. And I was like—

Carrie Tollefson: It probably was 2005, because a lot of people do that. They run the year in miles.

Andrew Harley: It was absolutely wild. I knew she ran a lot, but I didn't know it was that much. I never had this sense of, oh, I should try to get to X amount. I always just ran what I ran and that's what it was. That was the first time I was like, “Oh man, this girl's dusting me under the table. Do I need to run more to look more like a real athlete?” And so that comparison is certainly there when you see what other people are doing. I love how, you know, I see athletes post, like through Garmin, they'll post to social media, “Here is my workout stats,” or through Strava, they'll post a, you can post to social what your workout stats. On TriDot and RunDot, the new versions of the apps, our team did an amazing job. You can post, it's not a screenshot, you can push to social, “Here's what I did in my workout,” and it's got the stats. But the leading stat, Jeff, isn't the volume, it's your TrainX score. “Here's the TrainX score I got today,” which is super, super cool. But when athletes are talking shop, it's usually a comparison of mileage, or it's a comparison of here's how hard I ran, or here's what my pace was. People aren't talking about, or bragging about, “Here's how well I stayed in my Training Zones,” or, “Here's how well I adhere to what my training plan told me to do.” What's wrong with that, Jeff?

Jeff Booher: Well, it’s natural that -- it's hard to articulate, and most people don't have a common language and knowledge to explain that. And so that's not what gets praised, and that's not what you share. Most athletes and coaches think that volume is a training variable, but it isn't. The actual training variables are intensity, duration, frequency, sequence, and technique. So intensity: how hard you work. Duration: how long you maintain that intensity. Frequency: how frequently, how often can you do that -- it involves recovery and all these different things. And then sequence: what order do you do your workouts in. And then technique: how do you do the workouts. Doing them differently recruits different muscle groups and does different things. So intensity, duration, frequency, sequence, and technique. Those are the inputs that the athlete and the coach should be focused on. And they're harder, much harder, and you have to have tools and have to understand how they dynamically work together. Volume is just what comes out of those inputs. If you're doing it correctly -- instead of the goal itself, you just jumped straight to volume -- it should be, “Here's the intensities that I need to do.” And there's many different adaptations. You're mitochondrial proliferation, and your oxygen consumption utilization, and your stroke volume, and all these different things happen differently with different kinds of intensities, different kinds of rest periods, different kinds of durations. That's what you need to be managing, coaches and athletes. And when you do those things right, you're going to use intensity, duration, and frequency. And the output, the byproduct of that is a volume. But it's not the lever itself. Don't just increase volume. You do all those things right, optimally, and that's going to get the most efficient training. And then we're talking mainly about pace here, or about volume here, but pace is similar to that. A lot of people think pace is a training variable. It's not. It's intensity is the real variable, not pace. Pace is an output of intensity in certain conditions. So if you're running a 7-minute pace, well, you shouldn't be running a 7-minute pace if it's hot, or it's humid, or you're on hills or different things, right? Even if you're in Zone 2, you're measuring it by heart rate, so not your pace at all, but the internal measure of intensity, how your body's perceiving that effort. So it's the intensity that you should be doing, not the outward pace itself. But like you said, athletes are so focused on volume, and pace, and these things that they can easily quantify, they see, and they can brag about, but those are the outputs of the input. So if you think of the “more is better”, I like an analogy that compares that mentality, “more is better.” It's kind of silly when you think of it like this. Take a salesperson who's dialing for dollars. They're making calls. They’re trying to sell, increase, and get that big commission check. Think about a salesperson that measures their success strictly by call volume, and they try to improve that success just by making more calls while they're ignoring who they're calling, what they're asking, and what they're saying. Salespeople that want to close more—

Andrew Harley: And is it converting?

Jeff Booher: Yeah, right. So doing more of something, maybe they're getting mediocre, moderate results with that, but they're much better off to focus on the ‘how’ that goes into their calling -- who they're calling, why they're calling, and what they're asking, how persuasive are they? Are they communicating the right things? Are they building -- all of those things that go into it. Then increase the calling volume, if you can. So they’re so much better at that approach. So it's more about how they're calling than how much they're calling. And the call volumes are just the output of that, just like training. So training works the same way. So volume isn't the training variable, it's the byproduct of the variables that actually drive adaptation.

Andrew Harley: So Jeff, before I was using TriDot for my training, I, for a couple years, was a triathlete. I just trained on my own. I got off of work and did whatever I felt like doing that day. I started with sprints, and moved up to olympics, and moved up to doing half-Ironman events. And the only thing I knew to do different in my training, in that growth progression, was, “Oh, I just signed up for a half IRONMAN. I need to be training longer.” So on my own, I would just guess at, “Okay, well, last week, my longest run was 6 miles. So this week, I'm going to make my longest run 8 miles.” Or, “Instead of being an hour, we're going to make an hour and 20 minutes.” Because I knew, “Oh, I've got to be ready to run this distance on race day.” And the only “training variables”, so to speak, that I knew to adjust was how long I was out there, how far I was going. And I've gotten to see you do a lot of presentations. You've given a wonderful presentation to endurance sports coaches in a curriculum that we produced, where you were talking about what, actually, the data shows helps athletes improve. And so there's athletes like me, and there's coaches prescribing training to athletes like me, and that all they're doing is just adding volume. And you, actually, have data sets that show when an athlete is adding volume versus making the training better, we can actually see how much, what difference it makes in an athlete's performance. So can you just -- this is something that I know you've shared for coaches, but to our athletes listening, what's the difference between improving the quality of an athlete's training versus just adding volume like stupid Andrew was doing before he found TriDot.

Jeff Booher: Yeah, it's not stupid at all. That's what most athletes do because that's what they see, it's what you can relate to, it's easy to measure, it's -- historically, for all the reasons that we've discussed. That's what people do, and their commitment is awesome, and they're trying hard, and they're doing all the right things. And we didn't start with, “Hey, here's what the data shows. Let's figure out how to train it.” It came – like, TriDot and FitLogic engine came from designing that, we know here's the physiological adaptations that are required. Now, if we quantify the training stress associated with that, you prescribe the training, measure the residual effect on that, and you're going to end up with a place where we can prescribe and get very efficient training. So better results in less time with fewer injuries. Like you mentioned a few minutes ago, that TrainX score is a measurement of training effectiveness. It's training execution, sorry. It is the effectiveness of your training. But training execution is TrainX. It's a 1 to 100 score. So it's not about, it gets the athlete not focused on, “I just need to go faster today, or I need to go further today, or I need to go more this week.” It's focused on doing the right training right. So if I was prescribed 7 miles at an 8-minute pace, do 7 miles at an 8-minute pace. And it'll change if you're going outside, or on hills, or humidity. Your miles and your pace, all that stuff, your pace is going to change, the duration and pace are going to change according to your environment. But it's making sure that you're focused on the right training, the right design, and doing each session correctly. And doing the right sessions during the week. So it's both within a session, but then we have a TrainX score for a week. It’s are you doing the right sessions? Are you doing what's prescribed? So the study was that, where we went back just to explain this to people -- and we have hundreds of thousands of athletes. And so we searched for those that are doing a TrainX score of 60 out of 100 compared to those who doing 90 out of 100. And we watched the improvement, measured the improvement, over about a 6-month period. And we compared that to athletes that were doing 2 and 3 times the amount of training volume. And so we could see in here, here's someone doing a TrainX 60, and they're just doing this, whatever training they're doing, and they're doing 2 hours a week, 3 hours a week, 4 hours a week. And then another athletes that's doing the TrainX 90, they're not increasing their volume. So the ones that were at 90 instead of 60 -- so that's a 30-point improvement, or a higher TrainX score. So they're adhering to the right training -- they improved 3 to 5 times more over that 6-month period than those who had double the training volume. So that's, if you think about that, people are doubling the training volume, and these athletes are getting 3 to 5 times more improvement during that time. And you think, “Why the 3 to 5?” Well, that varies with performance level. Athletes with lower performance levels are able to see more improvement percentage-wise. And those with higher, they have less to perform, but it's more significant. The improvement that higher-end athletes see is more significant. So the lower the starting point, the higher the room for improvement on the same amount of time. And that's not to say, again, I want to echo, that isn't to say that more volume doesn't produce gains. It can. You can get that by just simply increasing your volume some. But the point is that it's not the most effective way by close. It's not a goal to be attained, and the gains aren't automatic. And actually, increasing volume can produce zero improvement, or worse, negative. You can actually get slower by increasing volume, and you can get injured. It really increases your injury risk. So at those higher performance levels--
Carrie Tollefson: There's a lot of things that it can -- a lot of reasons why you don't want to do too much.

Jeff Booher: Absolutely. One is it stifles progress. The training injuries are -- most training injuries are overuse injuries, so they are direct consequence of just too much. So it's wear and tear on your body. Over-training also suppresses the immune system. And so if you're consistently doing that, and then you get these big blocks of trainings, you're not improving, it's because you're over-trained. And the TrainX metric is what FitLogic uses to evaluate that execution quality, across TriDot and RunDot athletes, to help athletes focus on doing the right training right. And that's what we measure, and that's what we focus on. So doing the right training right is the right amount of intensity, the right amount of duration, frequency, sequence, and technique. So when it comes to training, more isn't better, but better is better.

Carrie Tollefson: Will you do me one favor though, Jeff, and explain TrainX to some of us a little, again. Just explain what that is.

Jeff Booher: You bet. So training execution. So it's a 1 to 100 scale that measures how well you adhered to, executed, the workout that was prescribed. So you have a number of different ways. So if it's a 20-minute easy run and you go 30 minutes, you're going to get a lower score. It's not extra credit. You don't get bonus. Or if it's an easy run, but you didn't go easy, you went a little harder -- most athletes are, “Oh, it said do an 8-minute pace. I did a 7:45 pace.” That's going to, your score is going to go down. You went too hard for that day. The purpose was an easy pace. If it's a long session, like if it's where you're building up to do a marathon or half marathon, if you go too far or too short, it's going to count against your score. So you want to just get it right. So there's no bonus points. And quality sessions, quality in the sense of its specific intensity, intervals, rest periods. It's going to look at the quality. And maybe you had 30 minutes worth of intervals and then another 30 minutes easy run. So on that one, if you didn't do 10 minutes, the easy run, it doesn't score you that much bad, or worse, because that wasn't the meat of the workout. The meat was your intervals, so get that right. And so whatever your workout – whether it's easy run, long run, high intensity run, or ride, or swim, for the triathletes, it’s just doing the right training right. And thinking that's the optimal. And you just do that the best you can. Average scores for people just starting out is usually high 60s, low 70s. And sometimes are, “Ugh, I worked really hard.” Well, just because you worked hard doesn't mean you did it well. I mean, there's other things. So as athletes look at that number, and they focus on it, they're able to measure and do their intervals better. So they don't go out too fast on the early ones and don't have enough on the last ones. They start to recover better. They make sure they go into this intense session rested. So when they didn't go too hard on the easier day before, now they're ready to do the harder day harder and can do it better. So those scores tend to go up, where the averages tend to be high 70s, 80s. Athletes in anything 80 or above is really good. So you're just nailing your workouts, and you're going to get a whole lot more improvement per hour that you invest in your training.

Carrie Tollefson: Does that -- and then we can move on -- but is that dictated off of your heart rate? Mainly? Just for some of us that aren't quite in tune with all the technology, is that -- are you basically looking at the heart rate for those numbers to know that we did go too hard or--?

Jeff Booher: It's a number of things. It's a bunch. And so we go with as much data as the athlete has and provides. So we'll look at, for lower intensity workouts, your Zone 2 and below, we go off a heart rate. So just don't go over the heart rate. If your pace is too much -- if your pace is in Zone 3, you're in Zone 3, no matter what your heart rate is -- or your heart rate is. Anyway, and your pace is on, too. So really go on a heart rate. But then the intervals and some of that, the heart rate is a lagging indicator. So sometimes you don't, it's hard to manage based on that. So with intervals, we're really looking at your pace and your power, if you have a power meter. So looking at those things. So it varies. And then we also, to equalize for the environment, a hilly course, or heat and humidity, all those things, we’ll environment normalize. So we're adjusting your pace and looking, okay, you actually did this in 85 degrees and 50% humidity compared to cool environment. We'll look at the hilliness and convert that into a run power, so your run. And so we're getting like a grade-adjusted pace, except for it's like actual power based on your cadence, and your body composition, and your pace. All of those things matter on how much was that actual power output. So we're doing a lot of that behind the scenes, but for the athlete, you just plug your device in, you do the workout, you get your TrainX score, and you don't worry about all that. We're handling all that behind the scenes.

Carrie Tollefson: I love that. I love that because there's so many times – and I think I've said this on other podcasts with you guys -- but when my heart rate was too high, and I'm supposed to be at a certain heart rate, and you get sick, or you're coming in and you can't get your heart rate up because you have maybe stress at work, or life, or whatever. But I love that we have more metrics to look at than just the heart rate, because there are a lot of different factors. And sometimes it is just like you got to get going peeps, and this is not going to let you just drag your way through it. You got to follow the rules, here, and these points help you stay on that. That's cool.

Andrew Harley: And Carrie, the TrainX score for the athlete, it really -- when it scores you, it's like getting a test grade in school. It's a reflection of, “How did I do on my workout today?” How did I do on this school assignment today? It's a direct reflection of, Did I do it how I was supposed to?” but you learn because of it. And so if I come in off of a run and my score was this, and I thought I did the workout right -- I got a 64 TrainX score. Okay, what happened here? You go look at the intervals, you go look at where you were marked down, where was I out of the right zone in my pace, or power, or whatever it was measuring? And it can show you, “Oh, I had 4 intervals today, and I must have gone too hard on the first 3, because I died on the fourth, and that's why my score went down.” So it teaches you how to do the workouts better over time. And like Jeff said, when I first joined, okay, I was getting lower scores, and you start learning how to do the intervals better. You start learning how to pace yourself appropriately. You start learning how to keep your heart rate in Zone 2 on those heart rate days. And before you know it, you're a better athlete. And Jeff, along those lines, I want to put a highlight banner on some numbers that you said about 5 minutes ago. Athletes, just looking at TrainX scores, athletes that have 30 points better average TrainX scores got 3 to 5 times improvement compared to athletes that were a little bit lower on their TrainX scores, or athletes that just added more volume. That's substantial when we're spending the same amount of time, we're spending the same amount, at the same amount of passion in the sport -- but just by doing the training better, instead of just doing more, the athletes improve that much more. It's wild. And it's so encouraging to like, “Hey, Andrew, go do your workout right today,” and not have it look good on Strava today, because there's a payoff.

Jeff Booher: And one interesting thing about that--
Carrie Tollefson: Yeah, and we're not just slog through. You don't need to slog through an hour just to get through an hour. The training tells you to go 20 minutes, go 20 minutes.

Jeff Booher: That's right. Yeah, one of the interesting things, also, is that we're able to see already, but it was born out in that study as well, is that there are higher levels of training volume that are required to sustain, maintain higher levels of performance. But most people just jump straight to the volume. You basically, your objective is to get as much performance improvement as you can out of the least amount of volume. And you improve it, or you increase it, as long as you're getting acceptable marginal increases. And so with each marginal increase, you're decreasing the amount. It's like diminishing returns. Every additional unit of volume, you're decreasing the amount of incremental benefit, and you're increasing the amount of injury risk. And so you need to be really smart. Get it right first, and then according to your goals, objectives, your time available to train, all those things, then you work up the volume in a smart way.

Carrie Tollefson: Okay, I'm going to give you a scenario then. I want to work through this, because I think that you and Andrew know the app and the business so well, but I'm learning and there's a lot of listeners that are learning. Let's just talk—

Andrew Harley: Carrie, I've hosted 340-something episodes of the TriDot podcast. You'll catch up. You'll catch up, Carrie.

Carrie Tollefson: I know. You know it. I'm going to get there one of these days. Okay, so I'm going to give you a little bit of a story, here. You’re going to visualize this. A marathoner who's been hitting 50 miles a week for years. She's been out there running. She likes that number. That just gives her the confidence. But she needs to drop it a little bit. She has to think more seriously about being a little bit more quality versus quantity. I think of that a lot of times, in terms of coaching athletes. So she's going to drop her mileage to run 38 miles a week, just by 12 miles. It's not that much. How do you think she's going to feel, Jeff? Is she going to feel better? Is she going to feel, mentally, like she's not in it? She's not as serious as she once was when she's running 50 miles a week? Tell us a little bit about this person.

Jeff Booher: That's highly likely. It's highly likely. So many of them, it's been ingrained for so long that it's about the mileage, and just maintaining that mileage is maintaining your fitness, maintaining this volume. And so it's really -- it can produce a lot of fear and anxiety. You've spent all of this time, all this training, the 2,000 -- like Andrew mentioned, his coworker -- 2,000 hours. You put all this work in. Are you just going to step back from that? You feel like you're losing something. It's like your followers on social media. You don't want to lose them. You build them up. Like, there's this currency of the value in this thing, this perception of self. And I think when athletes contemplate making that change, or start to, that that's a very consequential moment in the athletes development, with regard to training intelligence. And their understanding moves from an emotional to a logical and rational standpoint when we're actually able to see these things. And a lot of athletes, honestly, fail the test -- that they can't grasp that. Or sometimes, and this is the honest truth, there's a lot of athletes that care more about the kudos and the praise than the performance. They'd rather have people commending them and talking about, “Oh my goodness, that's great.” I know there's a saying, how do you identify a triathlete in a big, crowded room? And it's just, you don't have to -- they'll let you know. So there's their ego, and there's all these things. Would people do marathons? Would they do triathlons if you didn't track the time and you didn't get to tell anybody? So that's a big part of it for a lot of people. And so there is that element. And it's a fear. It's a fear of losing -- you feel like you're losing fitness. Like, I worked up to this -- to let that go, I'm losing something that I worked up to. But your objective is not to work up to a volume, it’s to increase your performance, and to become faster and fitter, and be able to do more. So when that volume drops, the anxiety -- regardless of how the actual training is going -- the anxiety can go up. So the risk is, in your scenario, that she reverts back. And she just says, “Ugh, I'm scared, this doesn't feel right.” And she reverts back to the high-volume training, and says, “I better be safe than sorry. Everyone else is doing this,” and all those things. The other thing that she may do is just quietly add back some volume. And we had one of our coaches -- actually, world number one. He's a coach, and he's an athlete, and Andrew will know who I'm talking about. In his sixties, about 4 or 5 years after he'd been using TriDot -- he'd been ranked and Kona qualifying, just amazing. He said, “Honestly, Jeff, you know, on the swim,” -- he swims about a 1-hour, consistently. And he would increase his volume, especially as his races got closer, and he would do these special, really long swims and he just couldn't let go of it. Like, “What if I let go, then what's going to happen?” This fear. But he told me, 5 years into this thing, that he goes, “Actually, just I didn't do it, and I was great. I swam better. Like, it was good, and I didn't have to do this really costly -- I said I had to go out do this really long session a couple times, and I just didn't do it.” So there's that -- you've been trained, and you -- because we don't have a mechanism to train A and a B. You can't split test your training. You just do one thing or the other, and you don't have a way to really concretely know, for me, if I do A or do B, which is going to work out better? And so there's a thing called -- to realize, it is a Power-Stamina Paradox. And we have another podcast that's all about that. Maybe we can revisit that sometime soon. But the realization is there's a real cost to maintaining a high volume of your workload. And the cost is that most athletes never see it. You have a finite amount of training stress capacity and time in your life, frankly, to spend. And how you spend that, if you're spending it on training that doesn't produce as much performance gain, high volume, then you're spending that at the expense of training that could have gotten you more performance gain. So when a marathoner, when she's running 50 miles a week, that's not just free. She's displacing work that could have gotten her faster. So that volume that she's afraid to lose was not the problem. It was not an asset. It was not something that was benefiting her, but she was holding onto it. So that fear that she has, that so many have, it's emotional. It's not an intellectual fear. It's not a rational fear. So someone can know that an approach is logically better, but when you feel like you're losing fitness, or I've worked so hard for this, or I'm going to lose praise, or status, or all of these other things, that's just important. With women too, but men, there's a lot more ego in things. And it's even amplified, a lot of times, for men, in addition to the feelings. But there's this image of how much I'm doing, you know, “How much do you bench?” There's that kind of, going back to how men pound their chest and stuff. But all of those things matter and they're real. Why it matters is because when athletes that can't get past this dilemma, the fear, the rational aspect of it, then they don't get to unlock their better training, and they don't get to reset that old paradigm that keeps them stuck and stifled in their performance improvement. So the problem with largely changing ‘your chasing mileage’ isn't what it does to your training, it's what it does to your head.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah. It's so true. I just think about my -- training your brain and trusting in the process. It is a really hard thing. I used to tell all the athletes that I ever had at my camps or whatever. The best thing that I feel like I had as an athlete was that I communicated, but I also trusted the process. And I didn't want to add or take away from workouts, because that's when things get screwed up. Coaches don't know it. The system -- your system can figure it out, but before we had this, we were guessing all the time. And this takes the guesswork out of it.

Jeff Booher: Absolutely.

Andrew Harley: I'd be curious, Jeff, because we've had multiple coaches on different episodes of the TriDot Podcast over the years. Mark Allen, IRONMAN Champion Mark Allen, being one of them, who say that they see a better training adherence and an ability to follow coaches' instructions from their female athletes as opposed to their male athletes. And Mark is one who has said that. I've heard some others say that.

Carrie Tollefson: Let's hear it for the ladies.

Andrew Harley: You're suggesting that here, Jeff. And when I started on TriDot, as a man, it was me and two of my training buddies. We all saw ads for TriDot independently. We all signed up for it around the same time. And so we're on group rides on Saturday morning talking about, “Oh, you started TriDot? I started TriDot.” We're comparing notes on our experience. And so three men who were in the same training circle, all starting TriDot around the same time, two of us loved it, adopted it, bought into it, followed it, followed it, followed it, followed it. The third guy -- his hangup was, “You guys don't feel like you're training-- I don't feel like I'm training enough. You guys think you're training enough?” Yeah, I feel I'm doing great. My fitness is improving. What's the issue? “I just don't feel like I'm training enough.” And that was his hangup. And so he falls off TriDot. We all live in the same Metroplex, so we're all doing 70.3 Waco, and IRONMAN Texas, and we're all doing the same races, race after race. And me and guy number one, who stuck with TriDot, we were getting faster, and faster, and faster, and faster, race to race to race to race, staying healthy, getting leaner, getting stronger. And guy number 3, his performances are the same, the same, the same. And he kept moaning about, “Man, you guys are blowing me out of the water now on Saturday rides. What's going on?” We didn't get stuck in -- and so it's exactly what you're talking about, Jeff. And that's, you know, he's a man. And anyway--

Carrie Tollefson: You guys are stubborn.

Jeff Booher: It's everywhere. We don't stop for directions when we're driving. We don't like all that stuff.

Carrie Tollefson: Hey, the ladies do it, too. You're giving us credit, but we can be a little crazy, too.

Andrew Harley: Jeff, there's an athlete you've talked about before, Nick Wanneger. And I've never met him. I feel like I know him by how much I've heard you share his story. To this day, Jeff, on Facebook -- Facebook has that ‘people you may know’ section. He pops up on that all the time. And I don't know him, so I don't add him as a friend. But I feel like I should, because I hear your name a lot as Jeff talks.

Jeff Booher: You should. He's a friendly guy. You should do that.

Andrew Harley: But he’s a man who followed his training well. But I think, just as you're sharing, I thought of his story here. Just share what you learned coaching him years ago.

Jeff Booher: So I trained, I coached him for a while. He became one of our coaches -- one of our first 5 coaches, actually. When we started 2010, he was one of our first 5 coaches. Those 5 were 5 pros that I worked with at the time. And they were our first 5 coaches, and the backend generated the training. But a couple of years before that, we started training -- or I started coaching him using the algorithms and the FitLogic. We wouldn’t call it FitLogic at the time, but he was training. He was very committed. Very, very fast already. And he trained about 28 to 30 hours. And his joke, he said, “I want you to coach me.” He goes, “Wherever the podium is—”

Andrew Harley: A week? Oh my god.

Jeff Booher: 28 to 30 hours a week, yes. And so he was committed. He was a -- they were DINKs, Dual Income, No Kids. So he and his wife, they didn't have any kids yet, at that time. So he just trained a lot and he did that--

Carrie Tollefson: I've never heard that. I was like, “Did he just say DINKs?”
Andrew Harley: We were DINKs for 9 years. Yep, we were DINKs for 9 years. We love the DINK lifestyle.

Carrie Tollefson: Okay. Dual Income, No Kids.
Jeff Booher: Yeah. And so he had the luxury of doing that 28, 30. And little did he know, about a year later, actually, he became a dad. So things changed in his life. But when he was training that much, he said, “Man, wherever the podium is, I'm one or two spots beneath that. Wherever it is, any races I get to, if they get podiums to 3, I'm 4 or 5. If they go to 5, I'm 6 or 7.” And so we trained him, and we cut his hours from 28-30 to 20. So his average was 20. So that's a 33%-ish reduction. And we redistributed that workload -- what he was doing, the type of intensity, the frequency, all those. And so the results was he improved in every discipline, swim, bike, and run, across the board, more than he'd ever been in his entire career. And he stayed injury free for the longest period. The whole time we were working together, he was injury free. And he'd chronically been injured with different stuff before. He went, actually, about the time he was about to become a dad, he was going to start coaching. And it's funny, because he hadn't done a full IRONMAN. He was doing 70.3s. That was his focus. And he's going to start coaching. He goes, “I haven't ever done an IRONMAN.” He goes, “I know these athletes are going to ask me, ‘Well, have you done an IRONMAN? If you haven't done an IRONMAN, how can you coach me to do an IRONMAN?’” And so we’re just kind of joking. It’s like, all right, let's do an IRONMAN. And it's like August. And so we decided to do IRONMAN Arizona, so just like three months later. So he goes from 70.3 training -- we didn't increase his volume whatsoever -- and he goes and does IRONMAN Arizona three weeks later. So he gets the second fastest American at the race. He went 8:32. So I think back in the day, I don't know that anyone had gone under 8 hours at the time. So there might've been 1 or 2, at that time, that had gone under 8 hours. I'm not sure. I don't think so. So that's really like about an 8-hour flat now. And so that was in 2010 or 11? Somewhere in there. So it was about 15 years ago. He went 8:32 for his very first. He'd never run a marathon. He'd never run – it was his first marathon, his first IRONMAN, his first everything in 3 months training, coming off of the 70.3 training that we'd been doing. So that's just one example. And I use it because it's so great, I knew him so well, and it was a very early on. And it's exemplary of so many age group athletes. The same thing, your experience Andrew, so many others, it's the same thing. The volume, for him, it was a constraint on his performance. It wasn't the constraint, it was doing the right training right. And so--

Andrew Harley: Taking the volume away unlocked his performance.

Jeff Booher: Yes. Yeah. Because we were able to add other stuff that he needed. So it was not just a simplistic volume. It's how much intensity, duration, frequency -- what are those other things that we need to optimize? And if you're focused just on the volume, you don't pay attention to all those other things. So that volume reduction wasn't a downgrade, it was the unlock. So the same dynamic works with age groupers. Even if you're 18 hours a week, or 12 hours a week, the answer isn't more, it's better. So that news should be great to every age grouper out there. Your 10 hours a week, you're running, 5 hours a week -- that you don't have to put in more. The first step is better. So that should be great news. Whatever your time available to train, whatever your commitment level, whatever your family -- if you're a DINK, or whatever that word is for being overrun. I know he has 5 kids now, so he does not have the same amount of time. But you don't need that. You just need to train better, and that's where most of your training performance improvements are going to come from.

Carrie Tollefson: Okay, let's go back to that marathoner then. Because she dropped her mileage about 24%, from 50 to 38. So what's actually happening now with her training load? Because you do have to feed the soul a little bit, Jeff. You can't just take away mileage and not teach the athletes what's actually happening. And you do that, so tell us what's going on with her when she drops that kind of mileage.

Jeff Booher: We do. So the volume dropped, and so one of the first things they need to understand is let's shift, let's put some other numbers. So you get more of what you measure. Let's focus on training, the TrainX score, your training execution. So focus on doing, whatever is prescribed, doing it well. That's the first thing. So get your mind clean. Start over there, refresh. So her actual training load didn't drop. Because training load is not just a volume. That's the duration of frequency. It’s also is a combination of intensity, as well. So when you factor the amount of intensity that she had throughout the week, the actual duration of frequency went down, but the intensity went up. And so with that as a multiplier and a factor, the actual total workload can stay flat, or it can even increase a little bit for the athlete. So when they see that, “Oh, I'm actually doing more, measuring my workload,” and not just the time. The time is a very simplistic way, but a more sophisticated way is looking at what goes into that time. How was the time spent? So mechanically, higher intensity workouts, it imposes more stress per minute on your body than lower intensity. So the same total stress, but less time, and more of it is done, more work gets done in less time. And so you're able to be more efficient, get more output out of less time. So it's just being more efficient. So that's what we have -- normalized training load, NTL, and it measures that. It's about what the body actually experienced, relative to all those things -- the intensity, duration, and frequency combined, not just how long you're out there on the road, or how long you're in the saddles, or the miles on your legs. So some metrics that -- the marathoner’s old tools, and your devices, your old platforms, they don't show your athlete, the female 50-miler dropping to 38, she didn't see that before. She didn’t have visibility to that. And so you're trusting this abstract thing that you have never experienced and it's hard. Once you see normalized training load, NTL, then that fear can dissolve. And so the workload is steady, or it's even higher. The time investment is lower. The adaptation is greater. The injury risk is lower. You have family time back, and there's no actual loss there to grieve. And so it's a very different emotional experience. So NTL, it's a metric, normalized training load, that FitLogic uses, and it gives athletes visibility into the true training load for the athlete. And it's why TriDot and RunDot athletes can train less and improve more without that anxiety about just mere volume.

Carrie Tollefson: Well, and I just think that people have to maybe train their brain to look at their numbers differently. It's not that they were not getting awesome training in. It's just that we're so used to looking at numbers differently, and her volume might look different, but her workload might look different as well. We have to just learn that. We have to learn the app. We have to learn what we are trying to train our bodies to do.

Jeff Booher: Absolutely.

Andrew Harley: Jeff, there's going to be athletes that see the title of this podcast episode, they're going to read the description of the podcast episode, they're going to hear me and Carrie at the top of the show say, “Today, we're talking about training volume.” And they're going to get this deep in, and say, “Okay, I get what you're saying. So how much should I train this week? What should my training volume be?” And we haven't given them a number and there's reasons for that. Reason number 1: it depends. Jeff, how can an athlete, at home listening, determine what their training volume should be? How many hours? How many miles? What training load should they be shooting for? How's it all work, Jeff?

Carrie Tollefson: How does it all work?

Jeff Booher: Yeah, well, there's a whole lot that goes into that in the FitLogic intelligence engine. And so I wouldn't be looking for a specific ‘how much.’ There's not, again, it's not a number. It's not, I’m saying that their numbers too high, here's another lower number of volume that's correct. It's not about the volume number whatsoever. It's about doing the right training right. And how much should that be is different for different athletes. It's your body composition, your age, your gender, the environments that you're working out in. It's what race distance you're training for. It's your current fitness level across the spectrum, your top end speed, your stamina, your power, all those different things affect that. And so I'd approach it completely different. What I'd ask myself when I look at tomorrow's training, I guess for the broad listener, is the source of that training, the source of the intelligence that goes into my training, is it capable of measuring training stress? Specifically by type -- muscular stress, neural stress, aerobic stress, threshold stress. Is it capable of measuring the residual training stress that comes off of that and that half-life to determine not only what intensity, but what frequency? How often should I be doing this type of intensity? Does it have physiological frameworks in it that can be individualized to me for my age, my gender, the environment, all of those different things? If it doesn't have any of those capabilities, it can't be giving you the right training. It's just not possible. That goes back to a podcast episode we did before, the first principles. So instead of just implementing, “Here's my philosophy. I'll tell you the volume. It should be this. If you're this, it's that.” It's not simple answers. There's no simple shortcut. It's the technology that can determine that. I think the second question is more the impact of that. So the first one is about the source of your training. What is that design intelligence coming from? What's the source of that? Is it just a philosophy or methodology, or is there an intelligence engine behind it? The second is what is it going to cost you? You're about to spend an hour, 30 minutes, 2 hours, depends on your ride, or run, or swim. How much of that time are you going to invest that you're willing to waste? How much of it -- is 30% of it wasted time? Is that fine? Are you going to do that day after day? Just 30%, I’m wasting, wasting, wasting -- or not even wasting. How much are you going to increase your likelihood that you're going to plateau or that you're going to become injured? So all of those, think of the cost of what you're doing. So how you train is far more important than how much you train. That's the core thing. And oftentimes, that requires you have to change your thinking before you can change your training. So I do have an Instagram channel, and we talk extensively -- there's a bunch of reels about this. I call it the More Myth. And so if you went to, what is it, @_jeffbooher on Instagram, you can find a lot of reels on there, and they're about the More Myth and different aspects of it and angles of it. And if you comment More Myth on there, then I'll send you this full breakdown article that goes into all of the different aspects -- more than we covered today -- different aspects of why that's just not true and how. Then there's other resources on there to kind of explain how do you get, how do you improve that intelligence that's driving your training? The most important decision that any athlete -- runner, triathlete, anything -- the most important decision that you make, in my opinion, is how you spend your training time. There's nothing that's going to be more consequential to your performance, to whether you reach your goals, to whether you're wasting your time, you get injured, you enjoy everything. How you spend your training time is the most important thing. And so make sure that the source of that is the best that it can be, and that you're doing the right training right.

Andrew Harley: Yeah, so Jeff, I asked you that question -- how should we determine how much what our training volume should be -- and you give a fantastic, technical, analytical, data-driven answer. And the translation, in layman's terms, is get your butt on TriDot, and get your butt on RunDot, and just do what TriDot and RunDot tells you. That, Jeff, that should be a marketing slogan. “Get your butt on RunDot.”

Jeff Booher: Yeah. Well, there's no shortcuts, just like with—

Carrie Tollefson: I love that he always is talking about family, and obviously our careers, and there's more to life than just training, even though I was paid to train for many years, people. It was awesome. I was paid to take a nap, go to the chiropractor, go to massage therapist. But that doesn't happen, it's very rare. So I really love that you always mention that, Jeff. Like, we know where your heart is. It's in your home first, then it's career, and so I think that's the best thing about it, is you're trying to give people this well-rounded life.

Jeff Booher: Yep. That was my, when I first got in, again, my Instagram channel, the very first pinned clip is about that, is my experience, 24 years ago now. It’s being competed -- do I have to choose between improving, and competing, and doing this goal, this ambition with, I have to sacrifice my family for that? And I just wasn't willing to do that. So that's what set me out on this trajectory. So I appreciate the kind words, for sure. It's all about, think more about what you're giving up is such a driver.

Andrew Harley: Go follow Jeff on Instagram and go get your butt on TriDot and RunDot, if your butt's not already there.

Carrie Tollefson: I'm going to put it on a shirt. I need a RunDot shirt. I'm waiting, Jeff. I'm waiting for the merch.

Jeff Booher: All right.

[Transition Sound Effect]

Andrew Harley: On to today's cool down question. We always close the show with a question from the audience, and this one comes from Jerry Dugan. Jerry Dugan is a long-term TriDot Ambassador. I've met him at many races, a very high performing athlete. Jerry, you're sneaky fast, Jerry, you're sneaky fast. And Jerry wants to know -- I plucked this one, Jeff, it's a great question for today's topic. He says, “Why don't more pro triathletes use TriDot or pro runners use RunDot? If it's good enough for an athlete like Andrew Hall to win his age group -- Male 40 to 44, Competitive Age Group -- at the World Championships, wouldn't it be good enough for a pro to use successfully?” And going, Jeff, we know who Andrew Hall is, you've shared his story in the podcast before. But even Nick Wannager -- if it's good enough for Nick to go 8:30 at IRONMAN Arizona, that's a professional time. Why isn't it good enough for the pros? Why don't we see pros using TriDot and RunDot? Good question, Jerry.

Jeff Booher: That's a great question. It's fantastic question. I mean, keep in mind, I started coaching pros almost 20 years ago now. The first thing: pros do use it, and it is good enough, and many have had great success. Many have gotten their pro cards while on TriDot. We don't recruit pros, and our focus really is on age groupers. Part of it is that's what we're focused on, and that's what my mission is and desire is to help the age group athlete. But training efficiency helps athletes at every level. So, the reasons why not, and there's many -- I mean, any person can have their own reason. If I was to group them, I'd say group one, category one, is they're uninformed. They hear AI, they think ChatGPT, nowadays, they think of a whole bunch of other things, The vast majority don't know what it does, don't know the capacity. If we got on a phone call walk and through it, they're like, “Whoa, I didn't have any idea it did all that stuff.” That's what we get when we even talked with coaches and others. But a couple of the other categories -- one is changing your training, your whole approach to training, is not like changing a bike. You can ride, switch from a Trek to a Cervelo to a QR, that's one thing. But changing the whole way you approach training is another deal altogether. And unlike age group athletes -- age group athletes, about 15% have a coach, 85% are not coach. So a lot of age groupers, they'll change stuff year to year. They'll try a different coach. They'll do this. They'll do that. But most pros don't. Most pros are coached, but they're not wishy-washy, going back around, they have long relationships with coaches. And they're less open to trying things differently. And a lot of times, the coach is the gatekeeper for the pro. And so if you look, there's commercial aspects to that, too. So a coach is, a lot of times they fear being replaced by technology. That doesn't happen, and we've had podcasts about that. AI doesn't replace coaches. It replaces those who don't know how to use AI, eventually. But coaches view a fear of that, being replaced and not needed. And many of them built their businesses on -- their entire business is they are the secret sauce. It's my education, it's my success, it's all that I know, it's my experience, that's why you're good as an athlete. And to come in and introduce a TriDot or something, that's antithetical to what they've spent years training. At the pro level, the coaches they’re working with have been doing it for years. So they've had this years without AI, that they've built up this way of doing it, their methodologies, their marketing slogans, their whole sales pitch -- all of that stuff is built around them. And you can't just replace that with an AI solution, no matter how good it is. So there's this natural conflict and tension there. Professionally, we don't coach athletes. We don't try to go get athletes or convince them to come over. That's just a common thing among coaches. Good coaches don't do that to other coaches, so we don't. And so that's a big factor, really, the commercial aspects, and the experience, and what coaches have built their business around, and then being the gatekeepers for pros. Another thing, to even address the coaches that are working with elite athletes. It's funny, a lot of our technology is around economizing your time and making your time exchange very valuable. Efficiency for athletes with constrained time, and different ages, and body compositions, all these things. If you think of elite coaches, they have a lot less work to do working with just elites. And it's surprising. A lot of people think that's so much harder being an elite coach. And I'm not taking it away from them. They've worked very hard. They do a lot of great stuff, educated. They're great. But just from the standpoint of pros working with -- or coaches working with elite athletes are working with a largely homogeneous population. They're all young. They all have great body composition. They all have great genetics. They all have high performance level. They all have as much time to train as you need. There's a whole bunch of things that are the same for them all. So if you took that same coach and say, “Okay, I want you to train someone that weighs 350 pounds, and that's 65 years old, and that's—" all these other things, that's when it gets dicey. But they are able to establish this tier, I guess, of athletes is a really nice cohort, and they can do great job, and they do do great job, and they're wonderful coaches. All of these people, regardless of commercials or anything else, are amazing coaches. And I think there's an inverse relationship as far as trying something new. the more experience they have, the higher the performance level, the more entrenched they are -- athletes and coaches and pros -- with what they're already doing. So the more they're married to it. And then younger athletes look to the older athletes. So the young pros say, “What are the more experienced pros doing?” And they follow that versus listening to someone else saying, “Hey, we can do it better.”  So is that, I don't know if I've drabbled on too much there.

Andrew Harley: Yeah. It's almost like, Jeff, we just need one pro runner, or one pro triathlete to just take a chance on it, and be the pioneer to say, “Let me go all in on using this tech for my training.” And again, it could still be under the guidance of a coach, and it'd be fascinating to see how they would do.

Jeff Booher: And it always is, though. Like, Andrew Hall is a great example. He beat 40% of the pro field. 40% of the pro field. And he's not young, he's 40 years old. So a 40-year-old. And I had one coach say, “Oh yeah, he had a running background in college, right?” I said, “No, he started running when he's 33. When he got into triathlons is when he started running.” And it’s like excuse goes out the window, and excuse. And I said, “And your athletes are training 25 to 30 hours a week. He's training an average of 15 hours a week.” Like, 15. These things are not accidents.

Carrie Tollefson: How long has he been on TriDot, Jeff? How long has Andrew been on TriDot?

Jeff Booher: I think 4 or 5 years.

Carrie Tollefson: It’s awesome.

Jeff Booher: Yeah. So most of it. I think he went 3 or 4 years before, and then has been on for the last 4. And he went to our Pool School, and I think took 7 or 8 seconds. He was a 1:07 per 100 swimmer, and went 0:58, 0:59 after that, in the weekend. So yeah.

Carrie Tollefson: That's cool. Okay.

Andrew Harley: And his coach, Matt Bach. Shout out to Matt Bach, who makes podcast appearances. He's coached by Matt Bach plus TriDot.

Jeff Booher: Awesome coach.

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