Fast newbie needs Oly advise

Comparing course to course, distance to distance, MPH is a very poor metric to gauge effort. A power meter is best, RPE (with a lot of experience and time in the saddle) and heart rate are in my experience anyway, pretty much a toss up for second best. MPH is a distant last. Too many vairables effect speed for it to be useful.

That said with no power meter and limited experience, a fast guy RACING an OLY with the fittness to race the distance without blowing up might spend the first few miles getting loose and then go all out just like a sprint. Look at AG results for sprints and olympic races on the same course and same day. There is generally very little difference in pace for each discipline for the top 3 or 5 athletes or so.

Pacing plans really come into effect at the half iron distance. They're useful for people with fitness limiters that want to finish an OLY without having to dial way back on the run because they went too hard.

There is no formula that you can apply to say that you are going to be x MPH slower in any given distance.  There are just way too many factors to consider. 

The bottom line here is a couple of points:

1.  You already established that the guy was a Div 1 swimmer.  His base is huge and will translate nicely to tri. 

2.  He obviously can ride well and is strong on the bike. 

With all that in mind the question is how consistently has he been with his workouts?  Tri specific.  What kind of volume did he put in all year, etc... 

If he's been training for sprints only the learning curve might be a touch steep on the run.  He'll could pace the race just a hair below sprint level.  He's a D1 swimmer he knows how to race and how his body will respond.  If he has the training under him I'd say go full throttle...

I agree with Doc.  Pwr will help him pace the olympic and even a sprint.

Most new people are better off descending into the effort, IMO, until they can master an even paced ride. 

power meter can make this super easy.

and pacing by MPH is next to impossible.  Even HR is difficult.

I pace of power and I dont even look at speed and only glance at HR to make sure it matches up to power zone, and even if it doesnt i'll go off of RPE and power before I let HR dictate a pace.

Of course, power comes at a cost.  IMO, most new people would have much better results with a PM (if used properly) and a 1,000 used bike than the same bike with race wheels.   

I think one of the big things that everyone might be slightly overlooking is not the fact that this "newb" might not be able to ride the full 40K at sprint pace but....what's going to happen in the 10K...if he chooses to ride that that effort/pace. 

I'd be willing to bet that with his current carry over fitness from swimming added to his few short months of Tri training that he could put a killer swim in and smoke the bike.  But without any run foundation he's going to be in a bad spot....

Bottom line is...and I've said it before.  Based on the training that YOU do up to any given race you should have a FEW key sessions in each sport that give you a farily solid indicator of how fast you can cover the race distances in.  You don't need fancy gadgets to predict this stuff.... 

I'm not down playing the role of a PM, etc...   I just don't think it's necessary for a guy who's been in the sport for less than 6 months and is only doing short fast races...

Nice.... Great advice..... I wish more people would see it this way. 

bryancd - 2009-09-16 1:36 PM

cusetri - 2009-09-16 12:03 PM� It suggests you think I dont know what I am doing, and if you feel that way, have the balls to say it.

Easy tiger! I suggest nothing of the sort, relax. Like I said, a PW or a HR monitor, or a speedometer can all be helpful but the OP's friend would benefit the most from getting out there and doing the work. He doesn't need "toy" recomendations yet. PW are great, I'm glad you like yours but I don't see that being of much help right now for the athlete being discussed. That's all. I hope you have a better day.

LOL The sun just peaked out from behind the clouds over here in NJ!!!

He's a D1 swimmer - he clearly knows how hard he can go without blowing up in training and racing.

I would tell him to go as hard as possible on the bike, just short of a all-out finishing sprint.

Then he should go as hard as possible on the run, INCLUDING an all-out finishing sprint.

I highly doubt he will blow up, or if he does, it will be a minimal loss of time as he regroups. This guy is an experienced high-level endurance athlete, and his results thus far suggest that he will be FOP on all legs.

I'm probably not as fast as this guy on bike/run, and I pretty much can go all out on the oly bike leg short of any all-out sprints and still run to my max at the end. In fact, I'm thinking I need to push even harder on the bike, even into the anaerobic zones from times.

I love it......where you guys a few years back when I use to catch He!! from people for saying stuff like this.

Trying to get a young, fit guy with a high-level competitive background to pace a short course race by using a PM to limit his race day power is just LOL.  If you're trying to race at the front you can't just dial in a power output and go.  You've got to worry about all sorts of race tactics, the position of everyone around you, etc.  All of that stuff makes it damn near impossible to just dial in a wattage output and sit there.

Every fast OLY guy I know (and by fast I mean sub-2) either paces by pure RPE, or, if they do have a PM, they ignore it completely during the race and only use it to analyze the data after the fact, or maybe they use it to loosely enforce the minimum power they want to put out, often going well over that as their RPE and race tactics dictate.

Sounds to me like the original subject of this thread just runs like your typical fish (i.e. not very well).  The ultimate cure for that is put in the mileage and get faster on the run, not to sabotage your race by soft-pedaling the bike.