This story is too good not to post for anyone who enjoys a good triathlon journey. My cousin, who has always been an active person but had limited experience in the endurance world,** signed up for IMLP. **This will be his **FIRST **triathlon. He would like to qualify for Kona if not in this race then in the future.
As of August 2023- did not own a bike, could not swim freestyle had a couple years of running under his belt. I’ll break this story down into chronological segments by sport. The swimming segment is the best if you don’t want to read the whole thing. I asked him if I could post this here and he said yes he would like to see what people think.
Swim
(Aug-Sept,23) He started just swimming lengths at his Goodlife fitness pool (I had to convince him to buy goggles). After about a month of this he signed up for essentially adult swimming lessons and learned the basics of breathing during freestyle, etc. Following this (~Nov-Dec, 23) he signed up for stroke mechanic lessons from someone who really understood freestyle swimming. Over these ~4 months he went from not being able to swim with his face in the water to being a ~1:50-2:00/100m swimmer with decent technique.
He has the option to live where he wants working from home and told me that he was thinking about Tuscon. When he arrived he was trying to find a swim club- I told him to contact Aquabears thinking maybe they’d have a beginner program. Hilariously, a week later he is swimming in Lionel’s group- completely oblivious to who all of the pros were. He knew who Lionel was only because we are from the same area of SW Ontario. I remember talking to my cousin and he’d say things like “someone was here for a few days with a camera crew, I think her name was Emma” (it was Emma Pallant-Browne after Miami). He swam with Aquabears for his whole time in Tuscon (Jan-March, 2024). During this time he went from being a 1:50-2:00/100m swimmer to a 1:35-1:45 swimmer with good technique, flip turns and all.
(April-present, 24) Moved back to Ontario, Canada and continued swimming by himself and continued to progress. A couple weeks ago he swam a 6:02 400m LC time trial. He worked extremely hard at this and I am quite impressed. From around Jan-now he has avg’d around 18,000m per week.
Bike
(August, 23) buys a ~2010 Focus Izalco Chrono bike. I helped him find the gear he needed. He went through learning to ride with clipless and all the other ins and outs of riding.
(Oct, 23) buys a Tacx neo 2 trainer and gets on zwift.
(Jan-March, 24) Rode a combo of outdoors in Tuscon and Zwift.
(April-Present, 24) I believe he did ~280 watts for the zwift 20’ ftp test (in aero bars) at 160lbs, he has done 205 watts for 6 hours covering 200+km outdoors with workouts like 10x15’ @ 220 watts. He avg’d around 9 hours per week of riding for nearly the entire year with his recent biggest weeks being close to 12 hours.
Run
This is the only sport he had experience with prior to signing up for IMLP. He had run a 1:34 HM and a ~3:30 marathon which he did with a stress fracture and a cold last year. His running progress seemed gradual for the first 6 months and then when he got back from Tuscon all of a sudden he was running mid 17 minute 5ks. He has run some 40’ bricks off of 6 hours rides and come close to 10km. He has also run a few solid 30+ long runs. He’s avg’d ~50km per week since January with the last 8 weeks or so biggest being 68km.
To sum it up, in total he has been putting in around 20 hours per week for the entire year and I am pretty damn impressed. Around March he started using Mark Allen’s TriDot training program at the maximum volume setting. I am shocked that his body has tolerated the training load coming from such little aerobic work experience. He seems to have everything together including nutrition. I am excited to see what he can put together at LP!
His Strava is here: https://www.strava.com/...12?oq=tyler%20sinden
He has documented this whole journey on his Youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eItxsNJoSo
(Edit: added his Strava and Youtube links)