Hey, what's up everybody and welcome back to That Triathlon Show, the podcast presented by Scientific Traathlon.com.

I'm your host, Michael Erickson, and this episode is Beginner Tip 11, where I'll talk about

optimizing for weeks and months of training instead of single workouts or intervals, which many beginners or even intermediate

or advanced athletes do. And this may sound a bit unclear at the moment, but it will make a lot

more sense in just a few minutes once I get to explain it properly. I promise, so bear with me.

Also bear with me because I'm doing this really off the cuff

because I realized that this is such an important topic that I need to talk about it today and not

in a week or two weeks or three weeks because it's just something that comes up time and time again

in my own coaching and that I talk about all the time with the athletes that I coach.

So that's also why we're not talking about what I said last time that we would talk about today, which was how long you need to prepare for a race.

That will come a bit later. Today, let's dive into the main topic and sorry if it sounds

a bit like I'm rambling. As I said, I'm doing this pretty much off the cuff with minimal

preparation but I hope it will make sense anyway. So optimizing for weeks and months of training

and not individual workouts, that means that you take the

big picture view of your training. You take a step back, you look at what you want to achieve

in the grand scheme of things and not just trying to nail a single workout. So let's illustrate

this by an example. Let's say you have a running workout

and you have some fast running in it and you go out and you feel good and you can actually run

quite a bit faster than you are supposed to than your coach told you to. So you go out and run

20 seconds per kilometer faster in that fast segment or those fast intervals than you are supposed to.

And you're on top of the world, you think that, yay, I really nailed this workout. I'm really good. I'm on top of the world.

And that may be true in that workout, but what happens the next day day do you recover the way you were supposed to

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