Joe Friel and the "advanced" athlete

[Deleted User]

Joe Friel's latest blogs make no sense to me. If you are an "advanced" athlete, you can train with a more EN style of training. For most triathletes you should not do this, he says. Why would that be???



Here is the link: http://www.joefrielsblog.com/2011/05/training-for-advanced-athletes-part-2.html

I'm no advanced athlete in Joe's book, but my gains with EN have been amazing!

Nate Parady

Read his book two years ago before EN and at the time was left a little confused. The whole build your base thing just didn't make sense to me. Partly because I was new to long distance triathlon training and partly B/C it JUST doesn't make a lot of sense. From what I remember he preaches that you need to be more advanced in order to work on your speed. Otherwise, off to the 3 hour zone 2 traininer rides 6 months before your race with you. You don't need to be a triathlete to know this isn't so. My workouts on the cross country team in Highschool always included speed work and ususally one day a week in the Army we did a solid track workout in order to get faster.

IMO, There is really nothing advanced about doing intervals or speed work. Middle school track kids do sprint work after school every day. Are 12 year olds advanced athletes? I think not...Does it make them go faster...sure does...Makes the faster ones faster and the slower ones faster.

Scott Alexander

I read it too, and shrugged it off, just like most of his "zone 2" babble. Every once in a while (getting fewer and farther between) he's got some good stuff, but I don't hold my breath waiting for it or get excited when I get his emails with his superior advice. :-/

Al Truscott

I went back and re-read Part 1 of this, and discovered that, regarding "novice" triathletes, he makes two points:

1. Almost by definition, any training a novice does will resort in improvement; and

2. The only evidence he provides is about the value of volume in improving novice performance. No mention of what might happen if a novice trained like an "advanced" athlete.

My observation of myself and others over the years is that success, defined as reaching your genetic potential performance, specifically in Ironman requires years of consistent training, no matter what your focus is, volume or intensity. There is no short cut. Many triathletes who start out with little background in competitive athletics find it hard to train with any intensity at first - the mental effort is new to them - and so they narturally fall into the LSD (long slow distance) model. But mixing in EN/OS style will work for the newbie triathlete, if they are able to ramp up their work meter.

kurshing

Who is Joel anyways? Was he a successful triathlete? Was he always a coach? How did he ever get a platform?

Coach Rich

In defense of Joe, I know what it's like to write a blog post, or series of blog posts, to put some thoughts out there on the web. You may not want or have time to give a subject a completely detailed explanation, laying out everything you think about a topic, putting all the pieces together, etc. It would be a fun exercise to get a group of EN athletes together + RnP + beers and just rap on training and racing, as a group. I bet some very interesting observations would come out that would all fit together into a system for those who were sober enough to pay close attention

That said, while it's been years (probably about a decade) since I read the TTB, I read Going Long in 2003, his model of training and organizing a season has become so ingrained into the sport that whether or not the "way things are done" is an accurate reflection of what's actually in his book is a moot point. This has largely been the result of new coaches picking up the books and coaching new athletes straight out of them. Few coaches develop the experience or perspective to step back, reflect, and develop their own methods.

Anyway...the beefs I have with the TTB training methodology are:

• Weekly training hours, and their breakdown across all three sports, are a function of numbers in a spreadsheet that Joe has made up. In the real world of coaching real athletes, not writing books, the starting point for ANY training plan is the number of hours the athlete has available to train, consistently, week after week. Period, full stop. Your Wednesday run is 45' because life gives you 45' to get it done. That run isn't 1.05473 hours because a spreadsheet says that's what it should be in Week 15 of your 36wk IM training plan.
• Made up terms, focus on magical aerobic system terms, lactate threshold, stuff like that. Joe is a smart guy. I know that he regularly reads journal articles, etc. I just don't understand why he insists on creating a universe of terms like Endurance, Force, Muscular Endurance, etc. The science is our "fitness is in the muscles" stuff, adaptations that happen to slow and fast twitch fibers as you recruit them through harder/longer training. The only thing I can think of is that he wrote his books years ago and kinda painted himself into a corner?
• A refusal, or neglect, to frame the training and racing conversation with hard numbers. Modern technology gives us GPS and powermeters. It's very simple: you train to lift your FTP and VDOT by training at intensities as a percentage of FTP/VDot paces, defined through field tests. You then race at a percentage of this FTP/VDot. This is commonsense and is NOT new to endurance sports. I don't understand why he continues to talk about race specific intensity, Z1, Z2, aerobic adaptations, building a bigger engine, and other amorphous stuff. Train the numbers, lift the numbers, race the numbers. Very simple.
• A lack of detailed knowledge of basic training and racing...stuff...that you get by personally putting your nose on the dial, shoes on the road and doing the work. I see this when he talks about racing, how to race, describes training sessions, etc. To the attentive reader, it's apparent that he himself hasn't done it and/or has not manage the training and racing of many people, quite frankly.

This is not meant to be a slam of JF personally. Rather, the vast majority of triathlon coaches out there are/have used his system and so my notes are more a commentary on the kind of things you, as civilian athletes so to speak, are exposed to through your triathlon clubs, magazine articles, training articles on the web, Larry the Local Coach's triathlon clinic, etc.

My experience is that this framework is a starting point, but that few coaches are in the game long enough and/or have the business requirement to step back, do some critical thinking, and consider how things really work and should be done.

William Jenks

I'll also rise to a bit of a defense of JF - even as I criticize him as well.



It seems to me that what he intended with TTB (and related writings) is that he wanted to make a DIY method for planning your own year/season. He had SOME sound principles and SOME things that just made sense to him, and he put together a model by which anybody could write down a whole season for him/herself (e.g., that whole spreadsheet thing that Rich talks about). TTB is a first order approximation... Rich points out many of the second order problems it implies. Moreover, Rich points out that the observation of the second order problems inherently point out some of the difficulties in the assumptions that led to the first order solution... but I digress and start using jargon...



I also think his "5 skills" of Power, muscular endurance, speed skills, etc were a similar effort to popularize concepts that he wanted to get across, rather than science. It's hard to argue that there isn't such a thing as what he means by "speed skills" (which we can roughly translate as "technique"). It's also hard to imagine that there isn't such a thing as "force" (roughly translated "maximal force"). Similarly "endurance" is a popularized term that people can relate to... I have less sympathy for "muscular endurance", but I admit that when I first read it, I thought I understood the concept, even if now I realize it's not some magical thing that the term makes it feel like... Similarly, he overindulges himself when he's "fleshing out" his ideas. His idea that there ought to be progression through his "base" phase isn't a bad one; everyone has some sort of progression. But the Magic Labels of Base 1, Base 2, and Base 3 are a lot easier to latch on to than whatever vague concepts of progression he tries to get across. Again, it's a matter of popularization without the most firm science.



I think there is another problem that JF has, which I have heard him discuss in interviews:



He doesn't read his own stuff. He openly says that he writes a book and then never reads it again. I think that HAS to be a bit of an exaggeration, especially books that he revises, but... Since (for whatever reason) people take him as an oracle (and are Type A to begin with) they read and re-read his stuff and take him pretty literally. He, on the other hand, does not see his writings as Permanent Testaments as much as his thoughts for the year that might be revised later. If you read the forward to Going Long, he openly states that he learned a bunch about IM training while writing it...implying that he did not consider himself an expert in the first place. I've seen this sort of thing consistently enough in his writings that I've learned to take them with a grain of salt and be willing to see myself as just as able to extrapolate the science as he is...and I don't always think he has much reason to go to the conclusions he gets to.



And finally, I think he sometimes pays for the mistakes he makes, particularly when he makes hasty Pronouncements.



Perhaps the greatest example is that he has been backtracking and trying to defend himself on the "build" phase for years. TTB does speak of "build" as being more "race like", but anyone reading the chapter will mainly come away with the more popular impression that "build" is the time for speed workouts. (I think it's no accident that our approach of speed then distance is sometimes called "reverse periodization", in part because it vaguely follows the "reverse" of the JF classically stated model.) But time and time again in recent years, he has tried to emphasize the "build = race-like" part of what he wrote instead.

Coach Rich

WJ,

Excellent points, as usual. Two common ways the Build phase is misunderstood, abused, whatever by self-coached athletes:

Build as the time to get fast

"I've spend 3+ months working my way through Base 1,2,3, earning the right to get faster. Now I do ~8wks of "build" type work -- faster sessions, Z4-5 stuff, to make myself faster. Two problems here:

1. For Ironman athletes, this shift comes at the same time that the athlete also needs to ramp up long event volume (long bike, long run) to prepare for their race. High volume + high intensity = overtrained, sleeping under their desk at work. This is what happened to me in my first season of IM training. This is why I believe that the TTB is fundmentally wrong for IM training. The Base 1, 2, 3, Build 1, 2, Peak model falls apart the the IM distance due to the IM volume requirement.
2. For HIM and under athletes: it "works," because the volume increase or level, per above is compatible the high intensity work. However, the beef I have is (1) the athlete has basically wasted a good bit of time and training for 3mo -- while they have been earning the right to get faster through low intensity training, their EN counterpart has gotten much, much faster and has a BIG head start come April or May, the start of the TTB athlete's Build phase. And (2) coaches and training plans schedule Base work and volume without regard for the environmental constraints of the athlete -- and you have folks in Madison, WI doing 18hr training weeks in February for IMWI in September (true story, btw). This is what lights me up like nothing else, as it's pure coaching negligence.

Build as Race Specific Training

Ironman: you spend 3mo doing "base building work," of Z1-2 volume. Then you hit the Build phase = race specific phase = Z1-2 is the "race specific" zone of IM racing = more Z1-2 work =...when/how exactly are you supposed to get faster? How are hours and hours spent riding 17mph going to magically create the ability to ride 21mph on race day? Race season ends and the calendar rotates back to base = more Z1-2 work and the cycle of slowness continues. The solution is to throw more and more volume at the problem as intensity is dangerous, not race specific, etc.

HIM: months of z1-2 become a couple months of Z3 = yeah, can make you faster but it's not as good as Z4-5 work.

Short Course: Z1-2 --> Z4-5 = this does work but the beef I have is all of the wasted time, per my notes above.

jmoss70

I bought a JF "IM Advanced" plan two years ago as I was beginning my prep for IMMOO.  Prior to purchasing I asked to see a sample month and they refused.  So I bought anyway and I downloaded it to TrainingPeaks, opened it and within two seconds I realized I'd made a big mistake.  "WTF, a 6 hour ride on Saturday followed by a 5 hour ride on Sunday?".  I immediately contacted someone at TrainingPeaks and requested a refund.  Was told "no refunds" by some faceless/nameless person.  Wrote JF himself an email and asked for a refund.  He basically said "no, this is how I train my atheltes and if you don't like it, sorry".  I petitioned JF and TrainingPeaks and finally got my money back.  At the time I didn't know about EN.  What I have enjoyed so much about being a member and plan owner with EN is the attention to personalized customer service.  The fact that I know that Rich and Patrick stand by their products and services gives me great peace of mind and makes me want to keep coming back - not to mention tell others about it.