 For many people, working with a coach makes the difference between just training and doing focused workouts to meet a goal. Yet many are initially hesitant about hiring a coach. One of the most common questions I hear is “Aren’t coaches just for athletes?” Well the dictionary definition of an athlete is “a person who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility, or stamina.” According to track and field coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” So let’s start by embracing that identity. If you are reading this, the chances are you are probably participating in a sport, so by definition that makes you an athlete. Another concern about having a coach can be justifying the cost. I believe like everything in life, if there is someone more qualified at something than I am, then why would I use my own precious time trying to learn that skill? From physiotherapy to accountancy, there are a range of aptitudes that I am not going to try to teach myself. Hiring a coach provides you with an ally and guide who can help you achieve your goals, manage your time, and take the guesswork out of your training. Let’s take a closer look at what a coach can do for you.  Gives you structure For many athletes, setting up the structure of their training is the hardest part. There are many components involved in how you prepare for your event. Factors like experience, goal time, time to train and others all come into play. Many athletes go out and do whatever they feel like on any given day. Haphazard training like this is not the best way to get faster. A coach will build structure into your training in a scientifically proven way that will maximise your performance on race day. How many of us really train smart and understand when and how to focus on muscular endurance or anaerobic sessions during our training season? A coach will harness principles such as periodisation, specificity and peaking to construct a macrocycle that will allow you to get the most out of your training. Saves you time (and energy) Generic training plans, like ones that can be downloaded from the internet are difficult to stick to, and are probably not ideal for anyone (let's not even start on the fact that most of them are devised around the male physiology!). Likewise building your own training plan can be technically difficult and often leads to anxiety that you're missing something. This undermines your confidence and often leads to poor planning and chaotic training. The majority of athletes have limited time to spend training, so ensuring that every session matters is key. Having a coach takes the guesswork out of your scheduling – they will create a plan that works with your schedule and directly addresses your strengths and weaknesses. This frees you up to have one sole focus: getting the training done. This is mentally liberating and allows you to channel your energy into nailing workouts. Provides Accountability and Motivation Daily training, whilst effective, can also be draining. From hard tempo runs to long bike rides, the training can be daunting at times. Discipline requires will-power, which is a finite resource and even the best of us can run out of it. Having a coach invested in your success and monitoring your workouts simply makes it easier to tackle your workouts. Those little voices in your head that question why you need to bother, or who will know if you miss a workout subside when you have someone holding you accountable. Remember – even coaches have coaches for this reason. Having someone else to cheer you on and push your limits can make all the difference. Having a coach to encourage you through training, even on the difficult days can keep you on track to reach your goals. When you have support you can reach higher. I love hearing how not only the physical, but the mental side of coaching has inspired my athletes to great things with comments like this: “With Denise’s help I discovered how to find empowerment in my fear, how to tap into my inner potential, how to celebrate every step along the way..."  Shares experience and knowledge Many people learn with trial and error but having a coach can eliminate a lot of those trials so that you have fewer errors in training and racing. Their expertise should eliminate the learning curve for you. Endurance training in particular can be addictive, and overtraining is a real concern. Having someone else to monitor not just your daily workouts but your overall health can keep you from overdoing it. For many athletes, taking a rest is the hardest part of training. Going too hard, too often can lead to injury, something no athlete wants to experience. Having a coach pull back your training before an injury happens is highly valuable. Does the analysis for you Doing the training is one thing, but how do you dissect that information afterwards? It can be overwhelming and time consuming. As well as heart rate, power and so on, a good coach will be familiar looking at data such as efficiency factor, intensity factor, TSS and many more metrics. Not only that but coaches who offer 1:1 analysis sessions on your form in any of your disciplines are invaluable. Swimming in particular is such a technical sport, with so many nuances that it is hard for an athlete to really know what their stroke looks like, yet when corrections are made it can a significant difference. Reactions like this make me smile: “Thank you Denise, finally, with your help I am getting faster and I now love swimming!”  What about female specific coaching? Well of course this is something I am passionate about. In the same way that no two athletes should be treated the same or given an ‘off the shelf’ training plan, women should not be training using the same protocols as men. In the words of Dr Stacy Sims “women are not small men”, yet as most physical training research has historically been conducted on men, this is exactly what has happened – many training plans are produced for men and ‘shrunk’ for women. At the most basic level, the standard training structure of progressive overload followed by a short de-load on a standardised ‘3 weeks on, 1 week off’ pattern frequently applied to men does not permit women to take advantage of optimal training adaptations the way they can if they match their training intensity to their physiology and hormone levels. But this is a much bigger subject which I will go into in my next blog, so watch this space…. 
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 In the first part of my blog post we left off halfway through my challenge at 8am on the Friday morning, where I had completed just over 5.2km of swimming and 160km on the bike in the first 12 hours of my Aquabike. The other highlight of that time of day was that the YMCA gym had opened and so I could use their toilets, yay, how exciting, indoors weeing! I was feeling pretty smug as I did my fifth swim and then set off on my next two hour bike ride. And then suddenly things started to hurt. The wind had picked up and the hills around Richmond Park were starting to feel harder and harder. The sun might have finally come out, but my mind started to torment me for being so self-congratulatory. It was 10am and I did the thing I told myself not to do – think about how long there was left to go.
As I cycled back into our little base I shouted out “ok this is officially bloody hard!” and got off my bike trying not to cry, thinking that I had done 15 hours, but still had 9 hours left to go. I tried to not be too grumpy though as one of my swimming buddies from the Serpentine, Fiona was there smiling and waving some homemade protein cookies at me. I got into the river for swim number six and was aware of how busy the water had become. Ever the pro though, Hila had my back and kept me clear of the groups of rowers who had now come out. At one point I was aware of her talking to one of them and then the rower shouting at me “Well done, that’s amazing, keep going!” It immediately lifted my spirits and made me feel proud. It was time for another 20 minute break and a chance to eat something half decent. Chicken with egg noodles, even though it was cold, felt like a real pick-me-up. I thought I would also treat myself to my second change of trisuit and so sat huddled in my Dryrobe until I had completely dried off before I attempted that clammy change again. The sun may have come out but the wind was ever present and I could feel how my body temperature was dropping each time I did a swim leg now. Yes there is nothing remotely glamorous about this photo below, and Ian looks like he is trying to sleep, but that was the reality of how we felt.   Reading my mood, Ian asked if I would like someone to cycle the next leg with me after the swim and my face said it all, yes please! So that someone was him, and he did a great job of distracting me from the now growing pain in my right ITB and knee. We adapted the route I had been taking around Richmond Park to reduce the amount of hills as every time I did a climb my knee was starting to complain (as was Ian, although he maintains it was to take my mind off my own pain ;) ) Back into the river and everyone commented on how strong my swimming still was. I had surprised myself there as it had been a very long time since I had swum over 4km in one go, and yet I came out of my seventh swim leg having covered 8.7km without any neck or shoulder issues. Just one more swim section to go! Ah if only the same could have been said about the bike. Thankfully lovely Nerina had agreed to do another bike leg with me as she knew that by this time I would appreciate the company. She was so right, I tried not to dwell on the fact that I had another five hours to go as the pain in my right knee had started to really ramp up. Every incline and hard push down on the pedal was so painful. At one point I had to lie on the verge at the side of the road to try and massage it and stretch out my ITB. I was thankful for my next swim two hours later - hoping that the coolness of the water might help the pain. Remarkably my eighth swim was my fastest one of them all with me covering more distance than before. Was that because I knew it was my last one? It certainly wasn't because I was desperate to get back on the bike! But it turns out that the cooling swim might have helped the pain...or was it the ibuprofen and the massage ball that Ian pressed into my knee before I set off on my final two hours on the bike? By that point I certainly looked slightly delirious in any case! My final two hours on the bike were a hard lonely affair, the wind was up but at least my knee had calmed down a bit and I didn't have to resort to the desperate idea I had of cycling with one leg! As I came out of the park I realised I still had 25 minutes to go until the magic 8pm finish, and so I cycled up and down the surrounding roads determined not to cheat myself at any point. Oh but then the finish was finally in sight! I couldn't have been happier as I cycled back to our base camp to see my little band of supporters. Ian, Hila, Nerina and Luisa gave me a rousing welcome. I must admit I became a bit emotional as I realised I had actually achieved this! That final mark on my arm meant that I had completed 8 rounds of 30 min swims and 2 hour bike rides. I had cycled a total of 308km, swum 10k and been awake for over 36 hours! Add to that I hadn't seen my phone for 26 hours and I was slightly overwhelmed by the messages of support that had been coming in from friends and family, and to see that my fundraising total had jumped up by about £1000 in the past day! I am delighted to share that I exceeded my total and ended up raising over £2,400 for Carers UK and Carers Scotland. By the way you can still sponsor me here.  What did I learn from this experience? Well many things....
The question now of course is....what next? ?  The challenge really started for me when I had to try to get myself and my bike across to the start at Kingston on the day of a rail strike. Organised though I am, for some reason I hadn’t anticipated that the Overground would be affected and so I had to make a longer bike ride than I would have liked to get to a station. My pannier with ‘last minute things’ was also heavier than anticipated and the muggy weather and threatening rain was making everything hard work. Thank goodness for the refuge of Nerina’s house when I arrived hot and sweaty to relax and sort myself out. Ian and Hila arrived at 5pm so that we could talk things through and have something to eat. Everyone said how excited they were about the challenge and referring to it as ‘an adventure’. I must admit, I had a different feeling about this compared to mass events I have taken part in – it was nice to feel that we had control of how things would run. Of course the things I didn’t have control over were the weather or how I would fare beyond the 7+ hours of test training I had done. The set-up location outside the YMCA gym at Kingston was mapped out as Hila and Ian got to work setting up the gazebo and inflating her paddleboard. As I unpacked the bags and bags of kit I had assembled at Ian’s I realised how much of it there was – I am sure I had cycled across the Andes with less than this for a three week trip! But there was so much to factor in here, changing light, temperature and weather and I wanted to be sure I had it all covered. Suddenly time started to run away with us and very quickly it was 7.45pm. Although this event was in my control I was determined to start bang on 8pm and so I found myself dashing about to get my final kit on ahead of my first swim. There was none of the fanfare of a big event, more a case of me squeezing past some end of day sunbathers on the jetty at the Thames to drop into the water and then I was off! We had decided that rather than distance per swim/bike circuit it would be better mentally and logistically to split these sections into time. For the swim this was going to be 30 minutes at a time. With the sun now quite low the river was quietening down and Hila led me off on my first swim on her paddleboard. Well this felt nice, so far so good. I took my first 'transition' a bit too seriously, running the 200m from the river to my bike in my flip flops until I was reminded it wasn't actually a race and I should pace myself. I was still determined though to stick to my plan and make my transitions as swift as possible, and only take short breaks every 5 or 6 hours. Nerina was waiting there for me to accompany me on the first bike leg as we knew it would start to get dark by the second hour of it, and Ian had my bike ready with hydration and my small bag of snacks. The bike sections were to be 2 hours long and the first one went fairly smoothly, covering as expected, just over 40km on my trusty hybrid. Again, definitely steadily pacing myself for the next 20+ hours. The light was fading fast as I jumped off my bike and headed to the river for my second swim. Still, I was feeling good and with the lights on Hila's paddleboard and on my swimcap we felt safe. By the time I came out of this swim it was now 11.30pm and I was happy that I had taken my Dryrobe with me as those transitions in the dark are a totally different experience. With no sunlight to dry my trisuit, despite the warm day it had been, I was starting to shiver. Having done 3.5 hours of exercise I stuck to my fuelling plan and was looking forward to half a cheese sandwich (I'm easily pleased!). Ah but there was a smile to light up a dark night - Giovanna arrived ready to do the next dark bike leg with me. It was quite amazing to ride in the pitch dark with no-one around...well apart from the deer who seemed intent on jumping out at us all over the place. You definitely have to keep your wits about you! Back to the river and time for another dark swim. I was actually starting to enjoy these night sections. The river was so calm and so Hila led me right up towards the lock at Kingston rather than doing smaller laps, not that I really had any idea where I was in the eery darkness. We had started to find our rhythm here as she flashed her headtorch into the water to indicate when to turn, so that all I had to do was keep swimming, keep swimming. I was averaging about 1300m in each of these sections, definitely not my race pace but slow and steady wins the race here. Back to my little transition area and I decided to treat myself to a change of trisuit after 7 hours in that suit and all that went with it. I was grateful for our little gazebo set up as I forgot how difficult it is to try and get into lycra when you are still damp....many groans and sighs emitted from that little tent! My next bike leg companion, Luisa waited patiently outside. Luisa is another of my river swimming chums, and bless her was the first one to sign up to accompany me on one of the legs. I didn't expect her to do a bike one, but as she said, she didn't think that anyone else would want to cycle between 2.45 and 4.45am. She took it very seriously and set off at a pace - whoah Luisa, I am only about 30% into my challenge here, let's pace ourselves! This leg of the bike was actually even more taxing than the previous ones as the changing light was messing with our eyes and we were both finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate between the road and the grass. And still the deer were being lively to add to the challenge, as was the wind. It was quite something to have cycled through the night into day though and Luisa took us a bit off the beaten path to cycle past Ham House which was a nice distraction. She even jumped in the river after the bike leg in the spirit of solidarity as Hila and I set off to do another 1300m loop. As it was now about 5.30am it was time for a short break and some 'real food'. Ian had prepped my favourite go-to breakfast of overnight oats, and so for the next 20 minutes there was a flash of normality as I was eating an actual meal at the appropriate time in amongst all of this body clock disfunction! Time to set off on my fourth bike leg and the first one that I would be doing on my own - this would be the real test as I had now been on the go for 10 hours and in fact had already been awake for 22 hours. I found myself in amongst commuter cyclists now around Richmond Park, and a few people commented on my branded Aquabike top and QR code on the bike, asking what I was doing and giving me a big thumbs up. This was really encouraging and distracted me from the solo effort. As I cycled back to the transition area two hours later I felt really positive as I realised I was now halfway through, and I felt ok! How could this be? I had covered just over 5.2km of swimming, 160km on the bike, and hadn't slept. The word 'machine' was muttered by Ian and Hila as she came over with her Sharpie to add another line to the lap count on my arm which she realised that mentally this was a good motivator. And so I will sign off with part 1 of my Aquabike challenge report - it's all looking really positive isn't it? Well in part 2 you will see that I'm not an android after all as things start to get hard...  |
AuthorDenise Yeats is a coach, personal trainer, endurance athlete and avid adventurer. She is passionate about supporting women to achieve their goals, working with, not against their changing physiology. Archives
July 2024
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