Skye Moench - Race weight

Triathlon Forum
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Any thoughts on this? I’m on pretty light side so I would love to hear thoughts on this issue. I think it’s possible people misunderstand her old coach’s approach on weight? I’m also up for good power to weight ratio because when I’m light yet have strong legs, I basically smoke everyone. But when I’m just light and no leg strength, I get tired and wear out easily and quickly. I’ve been trying to find a sweet spot for myself.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C0wgDsovDBH/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

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Who was her old coach?

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Who was her old coach?From the Kelly thread:
Bravo to Skye for sharing her story. It’s great to see athletes opening up about weight and disordered eating within sport.Her ‘weight-shaming’ coach was Australian Cameron Watt, from the Sutton school. She kept him as her coach from 2018 to end 2022, including her excellent first IM World Champs result with a 4th at St George (behind Ryf, Matthews and Haug). The other aspect that struck me was Watt’s style to give Moench her training programme max a couple of days ahead. Which seems to me to be a ‘controlling’ behaviour. Moench noted that, reflecting on her current 2023 coaching experience, she can now actually plan her life ahead as opposed to depending on a daily session set revealed at the last moment.
Does Cameron Watt coach any other decent athletes? Will the women, or indeed the men, he coaches reveal ‘Me too!’? Or are they all happy sylphs?
She’s now coached by @DTD (otp) with great results in 2023.

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  1. Weight has a huge effect on running performance. Losing 4kg (as her coach suggested) theoretically makes a marathon ~8min faster, if you have 4kg to lose.

  2. She’s a pro athlete and probably doesn’t have 4kg of weight available to lose. You can’t just continue losing weight and continue becoming a faster runner. There’s a peak at which low weight and low strength cancel out. It’s different for everybody. The optimal triathlete body is heavier (more muscular) than the optimal runner body because of the swim/bike.

  3. The majority of non-professional athletes would be faster if they weighed less. Yes, you’ll be tired and slower at a caloric deficit, but that is temporary until you go back to balanced calories. Her advice is fine, if inapplicable to the masses, probably because:

  4. Victimhood/body positivity/“whatever you’re already doing is perfect” is catnip for Instagram and the internet. Next to dog pics and bikinis there is no better way get clicks. I don’t doubt that she struggled with this, but she also surely struggled with plenty of boilerplate training issues that didn’t warrant such a post.

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Any thoughts on this?

My thought is that deliberately losing weight often causes a decrease in performance as it increases the odds of overtraining and/or decreases energy availability for hard workouts. If you want to lose weight for performance it probably needs to be done very slowly or during a period of time where you aren’t building for an event.

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Name rhymes with Sam Twat. Has a habit acting like a psycho around other athletes. This includes Cal Milward and more recently Sarah Crowley who he also used to coach. There’s an old thread here where Cal accused him of riding alongside him during the marathon in Kona, calling him fat and stuff like that

Who was her old coach?

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I remember that thread. Crazy stuff.

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Oh the same guy! That explains some…

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  1. Victimhood/body positivity/“whatever you’re already doing is perfect” is catnip for Instagram and the internet. Next to dog pics and bikinis there is no better way get clicks. I don’t doubt that she struggled with this, but she also surely struggled with plenty of boilerplate training issues that didn’t warrant such a post.

This is a very real issue, no need to denigrate her for the post. I applaud her for bring it up. I’m sure there are lots of young athletes who need to hear this - weight might matter, but fueling/training/rest/recovery matters more.

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Name rhymes with Sam Twat. Has a habit acting like a psycho around other athletes. This includes Cal Milward and more recently Sarah Crowley who he also used to coach. There’s an old thread here where Cal accused him of riding alongside him during the marathon in Kona, calling him fat and stuff like that

Who was her old coach?

controlling behaviour and an obsession with body weight (especially with female athletes) seems to be a hallmark of the ‘sutton camp.’

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Name rhymes with Sam Twat. Has a habit acting like a psycho around other athletes. This includes Cal Milward and more recently Sarah Crowley who he also used to coach. There’s an old thread here where Cal accused him of riding alongside him during the marathon in Kona, calling him fat and stuff like that

Who was her old coach?

It’s appalling behavior, but there’s almost something slapsticky comedic about someone doing an Ironman in Kona while a spectator calls them fat. Feels surreal.

But obviously what a jerk.

Skye doesn’t even look fat to me at all. I guess she has a bigger lower body than upper body? But obviously quads and glutes etc are important in triathlon!

I can see the theory that says, “if you were hauling less weight up all those climbs in St George on both the bike and run, you could run faster”. People applied that exactly same reasoning to Gustav vs Blumenfelt in St George. And there are plenty of bony tour de France cyclists.

But she isn’t exactly carting around a bunch of fat storage. And the fact that he made this assumption without doing a multiple body scans even, suggest stupidity. What, so she just goes no carb for a couple week and drinks minimal water and now she’s “race fit”?

I think at the end of this road is an uncomfortable truth which I think she was confronting when she thought about quiting.

World Championship professional sport is often a matter of whose body can take the most abuse without breaking. It’s all over the place in running, etc. It doesn’t mean you can’t be world class, or have a great pro career if you avoid thr extremes, but I think at some level many of the winners are breaking themselves left and right.

It’s probably more rare to not have a winner that’s unbroken.

Look at the recent world champions, nearly all of them are a litany of injuries and/or mental health issues.

This doesn’t mean triathlon is unhealthy any more than sport is unhealthy. BUT at the very tip of the tip of the top pros? I sure feels like they walk that razors edge of who can go further/do more without breaking. And they usually break in the process and just hold it together “better”.

That’s going to leave a lot of broken bodies along the way.

12

Our sports obsession with weight is sort of wild at the elite level. I always look at Frodeno and this he’s a bit too skinny. We’ll have threads about Sam Long and people will say he needs to lose 10lbs. Wild stuff!

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Our sports obsession with weight is sort of wild at the elite level. I always look at Frodeno and this he’s a bit too skinny. We’ll have threads about Sam Long and people will say he needs to lose 10lbs. Wild stuff!

Didn’t Lionel says in an interview that Frodeno got too lean one year to try and help his run and it backfired big time?

Maybe in his breakfast with Bob interview?

14

Our sports obsession with weight is sort of wild at the elite level. I always look at Frodeno and this he’s a bit too skinny. We’ll have threads about Sam Long and people will say he needs to lose 10lbs. Wild stuff!

I am listening now and it’s very uncomfortable interview, kind of more personal and their own issues. plus the caoch is not present to give input, kind of a set up???

Rather then talk about the weight issue.

On the weight issue sadly it is true lighter is better ( FOR RUNNING , or bike steep grade climbs) but you do hit a spot were it isn’t the low hanging fruit anymore but for some the easiest to “control”.

This topic can run on forever but …… No one wins a medal for running with BMI over 20 ( even 19) and no one plays pro rugby or American football with a BMI under 22.

It’s not any of our business but she does look much leaner this year but “healthier” which I think many don’t understand. your not cutting calories and therefore “train under fueled” , if you can stay healthy and keep training with increased force load and strength it hard to be able to keep it on. It looks like she has hit that know with good results.

130 lbs at 12 % bf instead the best for long course tri vs 134 lbs at 10 % BF. More muscle power for the bike and run endurance.

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Any thoughts on this?

My thought is that deliberately losing weight often causes a decrease in performance as it increases the odds of overtraining and/or decreases energy availability for hard workouts. If you want to lose weight for performance it probably needs to be done very slowly or during a period of time where you aren’t building for an event.

Agree with this. Telling an athlete to cut weight like that right before a goal race makes no sense at all. It could not have been easy for her to share that. No need to try to explain it or defend the coach. The most benign understanding of it would be that the coach lacks communication skills, which is what they’re paid to do. But it’s outdated to just tell a female athlete to lose weight. Skye is a top athlete and was racing/training at a high level. If the coach wanted to work on her running he should have been prescribing more miles.

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The fact that someone like this has been coaching people for 8 years, including pros, is quite baffling.

Amateur sport.

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  1. Victimhood/body positivity/“whatever you’re already doing is perfect” is catnip for Instagram and the internet. . . . I don’t doubt that she struggled with this, but she also surely struggled with plenty of boilerplate training issues that didn’t warrant such a post.Had you any particular “boilerplate training issues” in mind?
    https://podcasts.apple.com/bm/podcast/skye-moench-the-story-of-being-told-to-lose-3-4kg-by-her-coach/id1595443343?i=1000638197252
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I listened to the podcast - it’s really great interview. Skye’s experiences are another representation of what Lauren Fleshman chronicles in her recent biography Good for a Girl. Also, if you haven’t read Kara Goucher’s biography, The Longest Race, it’s another stark account of abuse by a coach. Both pro athletes suffered incredibly, the least of which was about male coaches’ damaging rhetoric about female bodies. And, the biggest rhetoric used by abusive coaches is about weight with female athletes.

I’m so glad to hear Skye’s story. I’m so disheartened (aka furious) that this kind of crap still goes on. And it doesn’t just happen with women pro athletes. There are plenty of stories about male pro athletes who are pushed to the brink to be lighter to their own undoing for their careers at some point.

For women, there are all kinds of issues that come up physically with weight that drops unnecessarily.

The mental abuse from this kind of conversation becomes a lifelong mental health crisis for a lot of women.

(The conversation in the forum has turned to citing sources that say lighter is faster, but I beg you to think more broadly and consider who might be reading this forum. Also, so much research is done on male athlete bodies and not women athletes. A bit of Dr. Stacy Sims’ work is in order for consideration as you think about this type of advice.)

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(The conversation in the forum has turned to citing sources that say lighter is faster, but I beg you to think more broadly and consider who might be reading this forum. Also, so much research is done on male athlete bodies and not women athletes. A bit of Dr. Stacy Sims’ work is in order for consideration as you think about this type of advice.)

I think if you’re Skye or some similar pro and you want a profitable, healthy, podium/win most races and be a respectable Championship competitor with an occasional path to a WC podium she’s on the right path.

The risks of focusing on weight loss are just too extreme for the damage potential to her body to maybe eek out those potential performance gains (which are more likely to become body/mental damage first anyway).

For everyone else, you’d be crazy to focus on losing weight while training to get better. Very risky. My feeling has been that if you want to cut weight, you need to spend several months to a year on that with very low training intensity. Get your weight near where you want it and then fuel and eat healthy and start training while avoiding junk food. Hungry? Eat a sweat potatoe. Want a treat? Just make sure you aren’t lying to yourself and make them rare, but don’t ever tell yourself you shouldn’t eat if you’re hungry… just don’t reach for a box of frosted flakes. Eat the healthier bulkier carbs that will fill you up, not burn like a match and leave you craving more.

I heard Mat Fraser say when he was serious about crossfit he realized it was impossible to out train a bad diet. He also didn’t want to keep competing because if the serious lifestyle commitments it took to be at the top. Different sport, but similar mindset.

I’d like to lose a bit of weight for personal reasons, and can see it eventually helping performance if I do it under lighter training load initially. But this idea of cutting weight while prepping for Kona is reckless.

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SWEAT potaTOE?

Just doesnt sound appealing somehow