All training should be by PRE and power and then hr if you're using all 3 of those.

Always

Yes


There are a ton of reasons why PRE is a very powerful tool to develop. The first is what happens if your technology craps out in a race? You better be able to equate an effort with a duration in order to maximize your potential in that race.

If you can equate effort with your training levels then you'll be able to feel as you go from super easy to easy to moderate to comfy moderate to uncomfy moderate to not fun for long periods of time to hard effort.

You'll be able to know that you have approximately 30k left in the bike ride if I up my effort a bit I will still be able to run well or that you're on the edge and upping your effort may have consequences that will be negative. You'll know with 45% of the run left if you can increase your pace and how much all because you've developed a feel of what a threshold effort or a long tempo type effort feels like.

Everything you do in training should be correlating a feeling to an effort.

When I ran xc in college I could tell my coach +/- :01 how fast each lap was and could. When I swam in HS and even now if the set is 10x100 holding 1:21 leaving 1:30 #1 will be a 1:19.5 and the rest will be 1:21s. Developing an internal effort to pace clock is one of the best things endurance athletes can do.

In my athlete cohort all the people, who ran or swam in HS and/or college have this down. The majority of people who have taken up tri's struggle with this. It's a process that's born out of paying attention to what you're doing and for how long.

Running 3x1400 threshold/200ez on the track? What about 3x(1400 vo2/500ez) ? These are all things where as an athlete you should have your pace dialed in within the first 100m

Doing 12x100 in the pool at threshold on :20 rest? or sets of 400s or 500s? Now when you get into a tri with no lane markers, no idea how far 100 or 400 is in the lake you know your effort over those distances and you can just go.

If you plot out most people's racing in each leg you'll see a U shaped curve. Fastest in the beginning then the end and slowest in the middle. If you learn to pace yourself you can flatten that U out, make it a u or closer to a flat line and you're going to go faster.

Here's a question around this. which of these is faster:
1. going out gangbusters for the first 100 of the swim and then fading,
2. going out steady fast for the first 400 and settling in just below that pace?

You're going to be a bit behind the speed demons through the first 50 but by 150 you'll have cleared almost everyone in your wave if you use strategy 2. There's a physiological cost to everything you do. The more above your threshold you go in each sport the bigger the cost and the longer you have to go slower to pay it back.

The physiological cost is exponential as you get near and above threshold. The biggest mistakes you can make are in the first 1-5 minutes of a race, and in a tri, the first 1-5 minutes of each leg of a tri.

By knowing your efforts at aerobic/all day pace, threshold, half IM pace, marathon pace, 5k, 20 or 40k pace etc you can avoid these mistakes or at least mitigate them giving yourself a better chance of success for that race.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
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