Episode 148: Rethinking the Off-Season, Racing with Joy, and Context vs. Excuses
In this week's episode, we rethink what the off-season should actually look like and make the case for staying active while shifting toward more diverse, fun, and low-pressure movement. We also pull lessons from the pros, including Rachel Entrekin on racing with joy and Lucy Charles-Barclay on having the patience to say no to a race in service of a bigger goal. Then, we talk about reframing all the reasons a workout or race might not go well as context rather than excuses, putting your brain in your pocket, and trusting the fitness you've built. Finally, we introduce a little Ask the Coach segment with questions about road bikes vs. TT bikes for hilly sprint triathlons and whether a week of simply "touching water" can revive some old swim fitness. Check it out!
Katie:
Lessons on patience via Lucy Charles-Barclay not defending 70.3 World Title:
“I’ve made the really difficult decision not to defend my IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship title in Nice next week. I’m healthy. Training is going really well. And, if anything, that’s what has made this decision so hard. With just 39 days until Kona, I’m heading into the most important part of my preparation. I’ve gone back and forth on this more times than I can count, but I kept coming back to one question: What gives me the best chance of arriving on the Big Island at my absolute best? Anyone who knows me knows I’m a racer. Once the gun goes, there’s no 90% setting. Nice could never be a training day or something I simply slot into the build. It’s a World Championship, I’m the defending champion, and I’d go there to give it everything I have. That means tapering, travelling, racing flat out and then recovering afterwards all of which inevitably means missing key workouts, and with days I can’t get back. Ultimately, I don’t want to reach a hard moment in Kona and wonder whether I left part of my best performance in Nice. Once I looked at it like that, the risk versus reward became clear. Choosing not to defend a world title carries real weight. But Kona is the race I’ve built my whole season around, and sometimes being all in means having the patience not to race. I want to arrive on the Big Island knowing I did everything I could to be read.”
Great example of patience and keeping eyes on the prize! This applies to age groupers too with respect to keeping priorities in line leading up to a goal race, not taking too much on, not too much life stress, etc.
Some lessons here about planning for next year. Do you want to go all in on an “A” race? Or race a lot and learn skills? Or maybe break up the season into “A” race sole focus then focus on something else in latter part of season?
Excuses/reasons → context; remove valence; identify what you can and can’t control
Story from a workout this week that scared me – I was supposed to do 20 min warmup and then 3 miles at 10K effort. I was nervous because it felt kind of like a 5K time trial, and I know that I feel fit but haven’t “raced” a 5K or strung together 10K pace efforts longer than 10 minutes in a long time. As I went out the door, I found myself listing off a million reasons why the workout might not go well:
Coming off a massive volume weekend
Strength and a run the day before
The air was thicker than I was expecting even though it wasn’t crazy hot out
Route was hillier than if I were doing this on a track or in Boston
A little later in the day than I usually like to run due to childcare schedules
Bad sleep the last several nights
Etc., etc., etc.
I ultimately told myself to just go in curious and ended up smashing the workout – BIG 5K PR that reflects better run fitness than I can ever remember. The crazy thing about all of the “excuses” / reasons the workout wouldn’t go well is that those details then became reasons that I think I could actually go faster in a race setting. This made me think about how we might remove valence from contextual factors that can make us faster or slower on a given day. It’s normal to think about those factors to an extent, but if we can just think about them as non-valenced context rather than excuses for something potentially going poorly, it removes a lot of the emotionality around hard workouts or races.
In practice: list out some contextual factors surrounding any upcoming race or workout. Some may potentially improve performance and some could hinder it. But label them as just “context” and then try your best to execute anyway. As you execute, remind yourself “a race is just an expression of fitness ON THAT DAY IN THOSE CONDITIONS.” Nothing is an end-all be-all referendum on your fitness!
Also: if you make that list, consider identifying which contextual factors you can control and which you can’t. You may have more control than you think! And you can always control your mindset!
But importantly, sometimes you have to not overthink it and just do the thing, so cap the amount of time you spend on this whole exercise to 5 mins. And going out and doing the thing anyway despite many contextual factors that seem bad might just give you some resilience data points for future races/experiences!
Rachel Entrekin on joy and UTMB
“I just ran the course,” she said about her training. “That was the only thing I did. Actually I did one workout once and I hated it, so I never did it again. I think it worked. Maybe if I had done some workouts I would have got first,” she continued. “But I’m not gonna do that. I’ll just get second.”
I think this is a great example of why trail running or biking on hilly terrain is an awesome and organic way to build fitness. Course knowledge is also a HUGE asset. Rachel was 2nd at UTMB simply by just letting her body tap into different effort zones as she ran all over the course and by learning more about what the course entailed.
Also important to know what brings you joy. She knew workouts wouldn’t bring her joy, and even at the highest level of performance, it was important to do what she liked! Joy is not at odds with performance!
Posting again: Rachel on Rich Roll podcast
Jim:
3 Training Periods of the year - Base, Specific & Off Season
General/Base period — For most of our athletes this is the period starting Dec 1 or Jan 1. Goal: build a broad, diverse aerobic, strength, functional movement and metabolic foundation ("baseline level") rather than race-specificity. This is when to:
Build aerobic capacity (low fatigue cost, easy to maintain later)
Do maximum strength/power work (takes 8+ weeks to build, fades slowly, so front-load it)
Layer in other stimuli — technique, advance technical skills, new equipment testing, improved biomechanics (good time to work on swim stroke, better run mechanics) — since these are low cost to maintain once established.
BTW - I really like the Dec 1 starting period for Base as this gives you 2 - 3 weeks before the holidays to sort your gear, rebuild your pain cave, synchronize training schedules, gym membership, etc. (Why does my bike work on the trainer perfectly in April when I take it off the trainer but never works when I put it back on in Nov/Dec?!)
Then I actively signal to my athletes that the 10 - 14 days around the holidays are for unstructured work with focus on family, friends and fun. Then when the holidays are over, you roll into the schedule, pattern and organized gear seamlessly.
Specific/Performance period — This usually starts about 12 weeks out from your “A” race.
Goal: It’s time to draw on the adaptive capacity built in Base to sharpen the exact qualities the target event demands. This isn't just "add intervals" — a marathoner, an Sprint/Olympic racer, and a cyclist all have wildly different "specific" work. It's about sessions that replicate the exact, specific demands of your race.
Off Season
Key point: The off-season is a variant of the general/base period, not its own separate thing season. It is Base season with a lot of diversity. This diversity is necessary for longevity in your sport and more importantly a key mental break. I advocate that Off Season needs to be quite active but not mentally taxing. You need regular diverse movement AND you need a mental break.
I see two key patterns in my high performing athletes:
They take an off season for 2 - 3 months*
But they keep quite active during the off season.
Conversely, a pattern I observe in my athletes who may not make the progress they want to make season over season is they take long physical breaks from any sport activity during the off season. This effectively leaves them losing some of the gains they made during the Base and Specific period and restarting with a lower baseline every season than the athletes who had an active Off Season. An inactive Off Season is a particular performance killer for my Master athletes. The older we get, the more we have to move our bodies regularly in order to maintain a healthy, performative baseline.
*Taking an off season of 2 - 3 months is quite different from what many pros do and this is a good example of how what the pros do does NOT trickle down to how amateurs should manage their periodization. Pros will often take 2 - 4 weeks as an ‘off season’ but then quickly get back to their Base season as THIS IS THEIR JOB.
The physical problem Off Season solves
Endurance sports are built on repetitive movements — same joint angles, same range of motion, same muscle groups, over and over, for months or years. That repetition is exactly what makes you efficient at your sport, but it's also what quietly builds up imbalances and degenerative wear over time. The off-season is the corrective mechanism for that one dimensional, specialized body.
What it actually looks like in practice
Mentally, waking up every day knowing that I don’t have something specific on my workout calendar and I’m not chasing a specific performance target. It is my mental de-loading phase of the year.
Physically it can take many forms as long as it is a diversity of exercise and movement from your normal Base and Specific movement patterns.
For me, as primarily a cyclist now, my off season will include a lot of hiking, general strength, roller skiing, nordic skiing when we have snow and walking around the woods losing my new disc golf discs.
My goal is to load my body in ways my primary sport never does.
What if you don’t take an Off Season?
You can certainly get away with not taking an Off Season for a season or two but I’ve never seen a high performing athlete do well over a span of years if they don’t take an Off Season. It really is a ‘pay now or pay later’ scenario. The tax is always due. It’s better to pay your taxes in regular intervals than wait for the IRS to be chasing you down for a large lump sum!
We will always advocate for an Off Season for all of our athletes as our athletes are recreational athletes who tend to have a long term view of their overall health and wellbeing.
2027 Coaching/programming changes
Every fall/winter, as a coach, I really look forward to updating my coaching, programming and methods to reflect part of what I learned over the last 9 months. A couple of changes I’m going to make in 2027 are:
1) Swim program: Part of why I think triathletes don’t like to go to the pool is that they are putting too much effort into this sport. It’s difficult to have more than one speed and often that one speed is threshold i.e., quite uncomfortable. Ideally, we try to get triathletes to have an easy, moderate and fast speed in the pool and many of our workouts have speed levels built in.
One change I’ll focus on for 2027 is helping athletes establish their sub-threshold swim pace and most of the main sets will be governed around this pace. It will require the athlete to pay a little more attention to the pace clock but it will result in easier swim workouts that more align with how we want our triathletes to swim in races (which is easy to easy-moderate for 95% of our athletes). This is very much in line with Norwegian threshold training (which is really sub-threshold in American-speak). Building a large amount of time in the sub-threshold zone will quietly, over time, build up your overall swim baseline speed. And you can brag in the locker room that you are doing Norwegian swim training.
And this program will easily lend itself to regular testing so you can see your progress or where we might be getting stuck and need some technique adjustment.
2) I will be building two cohorts around Ironman Lake Placid and Ironman Canada. I’ve been doing a version of this the last two seasons and this will become more formalized in 2027. In practical terms, this will be regular Zoom meetings with your IM race cohort to exchange information, coaching, experiences and provide support. I find that the peer-to-peer support is just as important as any coaching I provide. We will probably roll this into a specific IM camp and/or some weekends in June/July where we can meet in the Upper Valley for long swims/rides/runs. This will all be included in your normal monthly coaching fee.
If you are interested in IM Placid or Canada, I really encourage you to reach out to me about this program. This will be a major 2027 coaching focus for me and I’d like to build up a strong cohort of like minded Ironman athletes in both groups. We are much stronger together!
3) I am looking for a person to help me organize Endurance Drive kit / gear and possibly other business activities. I am willing to barter time for coaching services. If interested, hit me up: Jim@TheEnduranceDrive.com
Challenge or Resource of the week
Katie: List out some contextual factors around an upcoming race or workout, identify what you can and can’t control, and then mindset your way into doing the thing anyway!
Jim: Start dreaming of the off season activities that light your fire.
Gear pick of the week