Blanket assumptions? I take in all the information I can, then make the most informed decision I can.
Knibb is an fantastic athlete. It’s very clear she wants/needs to race all different races to stay motivated. She literally said that pre Texas, so cool. If that’s how she wants to do it, by all means, good. So her demands of competittion juggling the different distances are going to mean she’s going to be chasing drastic training stimuli differences throughout the year, and going up against others who are more “specializing” in said demands of competition on a more regular basis. So she’s going to by default have a higher likely bar doing it that way when she’s bouncing back and forth between the highly different race programs. We literally just saw that in a race before our very eyes. But again NO DUH she just came off IM training, so she needs more time. And that’s the beauty of all of this. She’s going to literally either meet the demands of competition and be this beast of an MTR leg that ST experts think, or she’s not. She has 5 weeks to Hamburg to make sure she crushes it. Maybe she will, maybe she won’t, that will be up to her coach and her over the next 5 weeks. It’s not really complicated what she needs to work on, so again the great thing is we will get to see if she does. I think it is going to be very hard to juggle IM and itu all in the same season, some of you ST experts disagree. Cool, so lets see how Hamburg go. If she kills it, then she proves me wrong. If she struggles, there is no winning here. USA NEEDS KNIBB, no one wants a 92% effective Knibb, US affliated people all want/need Knibb 100% firing on all cylinders. She is going to be critical for *currently a low chance of an US medal in the MTR. I simply contend the more an athlete adds IM + ITU to their resume, the less likely they are 100% effective at either. I laugh that apparently that’s some controversial statement. But again the people who seem to disagree the most have the least amount of coaching experience in this thread; whereas pk, Diablo, Sheridan haven’t disagreed much on that controversial topic, and I’ve been put in my place before by those guys (T30 for 3 spots OQ ranking a few months back etc). So if I’m wrong, cool. I just find it odd the most argumentative are the people with the least coaching experience in this sport. (Cue my “fans” pov take from a few days back imo)
So there’s not going to be a ton of crossover so IM training is going to help her endurance capacity 100%, while limiting her “anerobic” ability that is needed in key phases of an itu race. So when I showed specifically where her IM training as probaly limited her initial itu success (that 5-7 mins of swim exit to 1st 5 mins of the bike), and you argue well can’t she just do T training in IM, it’s like “that’s not how high level training works”. So when you dismiss demands of competition, your not worth taking serious in a conversation. So peace
You want coachy things?
-3s-30s power efforts whether on a trainer or out on the roads. Conventional wisdom on knowing the min accelerations you will need in a race is count the corners x # of laps. So if it’s 8 laps of 9 corners, that’s a potential of 72 hard accelerations that your likely going to be getting close to max effort. They may not all be max efforts (some corners may just be more flowy so there may not be an actual hard acceleration, than a dead turn that is going to be much more hard braking + hard accelerating out requirements), but if you do workouts to prepare for that you know your getting close to being ready for the demands of competition (damn that pesky term). The closer to the front you are in the group there is less accordian and less total time you need to accelerate out of the corner vs the person that is last in a 20 person group, they are accelerating for much more time to get back onto the wheels. The 1st few mins of any bike leg are absolutely critical, especially at the MTR, because that’s either where you can get in a small group and accelerate away from the 1 person who got dropped, or it’s where you absolutely know that 3 people are 13s ahead of you, you then have to go max acceleration to close that gap. Knibb looked sluggish on this, but again she likely isn’t dialed in as of yet, so that makes sense why she could only ride wheels for the 1st lap and then when the groups converged, she was ready to take a bunch of turns and pulls at the front. She’s just missing that fast twitchy top end accelerations *right now…..but again NO DUH she is only now doing likely itu training (reason why she said she wasn’t ready for Yoko with only 3 weeks after IM TX)
-1x a week doing an itu style (crit work) to work both handling and the fast accelerations out of corners (the “cone thingy”) you reference, 180* work, normal L/R turns, etc. USAT used to have this double dead turn protocol with times and such to help athletes recognize how important coming into the corner, cornering and then accelerating out of the corner is. I think it was 100m with 2 dead turns on each end. They did that for about 5 years, I know Pearson’s did it (I did the test for him at the OTC back in I think ‘18 or whatever year it was he 1st came into the sport), I’m sure every national team member did it back in the day (pre covid).
-T skill practice that you are rusty at- (which she is). Whether that’s doing 30 push ups (or 10 burpees or 20 jumping jacks, anything to get your HR up so your not “fresh”) and then sprinting into T1 to mimic swim tiredness. Or just doing continous mount/dismounts over and over. There’s no “workout” that is the golden ticket. It’s where are you and how are you then going to meet demands of competition. Build workouts to bring the 2 together. So if your at a point your stopping to get on the bike, guess what- your going to be doing some flying mounts in the next few months to make sure that doesn’t happen again. That may mean a progression- week one running with the bike, next session running w/ bike + hoping on, next session running with bike + flying mount + 400m all out while trying to get in shoes potentially, or that progression is done in 1 session. Again it’s all on where the athlete is and where they are struggling. So if it takes more time to progess, then it takes more time, if they get it in 1 session, guess what your now moving on to another progression (go 3 mins max effort while getting into shoes, etc or whatever).
-High intensity run training- again that planning is more where are you currently compared to the competition (that pesky demands of competition). Every coach on earth probaly has a different plan of action, so whether it’s 400’s / 1k repeats, combination, that’s probaly more individualized among the coach. And hell it’s going to be individualized to how the athlete can adapt and absorb the training, there is no “one size fits all” plan.
-Swim is there. So keep doing what she is doing, she finickly of the FP swimmers has really random missed FP swims in her career (both OG’s), sometimes due to bad starting position (picked wrong spot or not among the 1st to pick so maybe default gets stuck with a bad spot). I believe she still works with Julie Dibbins swim squad there in Boulder (GJ may or may not do that as well sometimes?).
