It’s been interesting watching Lionel Sanders over the last year. Traditionally an exceptional triathlete with a very interesting back story who had really struggled in 2023 by trying to adapt an extremely data driven approach to his training.
At the time this was seemingly a long way from how he had traditionally done things in the past, however the results were far from what he had expected. Probably his worst year ever with even talk of completely quitting the sport.
Throughout this process, the public were able to get a front row seat through Lionel’s YouTube channel. He shared his training, results and constantly gave a running commentary on how he was feeling about things, ultimately reaching what seemed like an all time low.
However, as 2024 rolled in Lionel changed a number of things in his environment. From training partners to his coaching team and recently seems to have completely turned things around, culminating in a win at the Ironman 70.3 Oceanside event. Amazing to see!!!
This morning as I flicked through YouTube I came across this recent video from him, and there was a couple of things that he mentioned that I thought everyone could learn from:
There is no need to always make it difficult
You will hear him refer to his next “hero” workout which is in 9 days, in other words the race! Lionel was known for pushing as hard as possible in training almost all the time and then not having the performance on race day. One of the things he has clearly learned that training is training, and game day is game day. They are very different things and they need to be treated as such. You don’t always need to make practice as difficult as possible, every training session should have a clear purpose and reason for doing it.
Focus on performance rather than result
“ If It’s good for a win it’s good for a win, good for 10th it’s good for 10th”
Lionel’s focus going into the next race was very simply a great performance. He is focused solely on his best performance and he has accepted that firstly it will be what it will be, and secondly he can’t control what other competitors do.
Replicating the race
One training session he mentions is a “brick” session, or in other words a bike and a run back to back. His goal when he got off the bike was to do a short run, but “at race pace “ which compared to a normal training session was actually quite slow. He goes a step further by even wearing his race day carbon shoes for this training session. He is trying to replicate what he will do on the day.
Using his intuition
One thing that seemed to be clearly lacking last year was his own intuition. He looked like someone who was very simply doing exactly what he was told and possibly ignoring a little of his inner voice. An inner voice which is extremely experienced I might add!! However one thing he mentions in this video is “Listen to your body” , he’s working off more feel and less data.
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