Torden Multisport

Your watch doesn't know how you feel.

That doesn't mean you should ignore the data or throw away the technology. Wearables can give us incredibly useful information about sleep, HRV, resting heart rate and recovery, but none of those metrics tell the complete story.

The same is true during training. Your powermeter or lactate monitor might show you're 20 watts below your normal output, your GPS watch or swim clock might tell you that you're slower than expected. That doesn't automatically mean you're losing fitness or that something is wrong. You might be carrying fatigue, under-fueled, dealing with the heat, or simply having an off day.

But the opposite can also be true, too. Your recovery score might say you're not ready to train, yet you start warming up and feel great. This is where athletes need to become more honest with themselves and better at understanding what they're actually feeling. Not every bad day means you should stop, and not every good score means you're ready to have the workout of your life.

Start the workout. Pay attention to how things develop. Then use the data to help you understand what's happening, not to make every decision for you.

Your watch gives you data. Your body gives you context. Learn the difference.

One of the biggest mistakes I see ambitious athletes make is confusing the ability to complete a workout with the ability to actually absorb it.

You might be able to survive a huge training week. You might even string together a few impressive weeks and see some short-term progress. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're ready for that level of training.

This becomes especially common with high-level amateurs trying to earn a professional card, or young professionals trying to establish themselves in the sport. They look at the training of athletes who have spent 10 or 15 years developing the durability to handle enormous workloads and assume they need to start doing the same thing immediately.

So they add more volume, intensity, double threshold days, whatever the newest flavor of the month is.

The problem is that fitness and durability don't always develop at the same rate. You might have the fitness to complete the session without yet having the long-term training history to recover from it consistently.

That's where the idea that triathlon is one sport, not three becomes so important.

You can't look at a swim, bike, and run independently and assume that because each workout makes sense on its own, they all make sense together.

A great swim session can compromise tomorrow's bike. A big bike can take away from your run. Three individually "perfect" sessions can create one athlete who is constantly carrying too much fatigue.

The goal isn't to see how quickly we can make training look like a professional's program. The goal is to progressively build an athlete who can eventually handle professional-level training. There's a big difference.

Don't borrow training stress from the athlete you hope to become before you've built the athlete capable of absorbing it.

A stellar weekend of results for the Torden Multisport squad this past weekend. The athletes took home 5 victories across the globe.

Katie Kornaus - 1st Place Non-Elite
Race The Lake

Bastien Carel - 1st Place
Fox Island Sprint Triathlon

Riley Wrightsman - 1st Place "GC" Carter County Omnium

Matt Picht - 1st Place AG
Storm Lake Sprint Triathlon

Bill Knoedel - 1st Place
Elkhart TT Series

Marko Glassner - 2nd Place
NaGold 183.8km Aquabike

Still plenty of finish lines to cross yet this season. Keep up the great work, squad!

One thing that is important to understand about how I coach swimming as both a professional triathlon AND swimming coach.

It's not because I think triathletes should swim less or avoid hard swimming. It's because swimming and triathlon are different sports with different demands.

The swim is often treated as if it exists independently from the rest of the training program.

It doesn't.

A hard swim creates fatigue just like a hard bike or run does. Long kick sets, repeated high-intensity intervals, and huge amounts of volume might make sense for a competitive swimmer whose primary goal is to maximize their swimming performance.

But for a triathlete, that same training has to be considered in the context of everything else they're trying to accomplish.

For an elite age-group athlete or young professional, I'm much more interested in how much performance we can get from the swim for the amount of fatigue it creates.

You don't get extra points for being destroyed after Tuesday's swim. You get points for getting out of the water ready to execute the bike.

That's why I approach triathlon swimming differently. We still want athletes to become technically sound, swim fast, and develop the ability to hold race pace. But we also need to consider what that swim costs and how it affects the rest of the athlete's training. This is why our program uses swim tools such as paddles and pull buoy seemingly so much more than most.

The goal isn't to maximize the swimmer.
The goal is to maximize the triathlete. Swim training should support the triathlon, not compete with it.

Seeing results in the pool, but having sky high heart rates on the bike or falling apart during the run? Send us a message and let's analyze your swim program first!

August is when your training starts collecting the bill.

This is the time of year when many athletes begin to notice things they didn't expect.

The fitness is there. The numbers are improving. Workouts that seemed impossible earlier in the year are now becoming manageable.

But suddenly a small issue appears. A tight Achilles. A hamstring that feels like it won't loosen up. A knee, shoulder, or lower back that starts talking during longer runs.

The common assumption is that the athlete did something wrong in one workout. In reality, it is usually the result of months of accumulated stress that the body has not fully absorbed.

And this is where many athletes misunderstand training. Running fast is not the problem. Hard training is not the problem. Those are necessary parts of becoming a better athlete.

The problem is constantly stacking stress on top of stress without giving the body enough time to adapt.

A hard session is the stimulus. The recovery afterward is where the adaptation occurs. When every run becomes moderately hard, when every long run turns into a race simulation, and when athletes constantly chase reassurance that they are "fit enough," they often create a situation where fatigue continues to build while durability falls behind.

The best endurance athletes aren't successful because they avoid intensity. They are successful because they know how to use intensity.

They create separation between hard and easy days. They allow their bodies time to absorb training. They show up to key sessions ready to execute instead of constantly carrying fatigue.

With fall Ironman and marathon races approaching, the goal isn't to prove your fitness every week.

The goal is to arrive healthy enough to express it. Because fitness only matters if your body can actually deliver it on race day.

What is the hardest part for you as an athlete: holding back when you know you’re fit, or trusting that the easy days are helping you improve?

Send us a message if you're in a conundrum. Allow yourself to finalize your preparation properly!

Torden athletes are taking to the start lines all over the world this week. Wishing the best mechanical luck to all athletes!

Surprised from this past weekend's result at Challenge Roth with Alanis Siffert? Or perhaps over the past few years with Julie Derron at the Olympics and also Ironman? Now is a great time to go listen to all the SECRETS that have led to their success in the now ancient podcast I did with Scientific Triathlon back in 2018.

Go back even further to the successful careers of Chrissie Wellington, Daniela Ryf, Emma Snowsill, Nicola Spirig, Tim Don, James Cunnama, Siri Lindley, Caroline Steffen, Greg Bennett and so many more. At some point you have to stop asking, "What are secret workouts?" and start asking what these athletes all had in common.

There isn't one magical training session or a revolutionary philosophy. It is years of consistent development.

Too many athletes have lost sight of long-term athletic development. Too many athletes are trying to train like someone in their tenth or fifteenth year of high-level training when they've only been doing the sport seriously for two or three. They jump from one trending workout to the next, chasing FTP, VO₂max, and wonder why they plateau or break down.

The best coaches understand that you're not just preparing an athlete for their next race. You're developing someone who can tolerate more training, recover better, and become more durable year after year. That process isn't exciting, but it's what allows athletes to keep improving long after others have stalled.

The recent success of Julie Derron and Alanis Siffert isn't something that happened overnight. It's the result of years of patiently building robust athletes who can consistently absorb training at a high level.

There's a lesson in that for every age-group athlete. Stop looking for the workout that's going to change your season and start building the habits that will change the next five years. That's where the biggest gains are made.

The Trisutto Way of Triathlon Training with Carson Christen | EP#140 Carson Christen is a sport scientist and professional endurance coach with Trisutto. We discuss the Trisutto approach to triathlon training and its components, including specific aspects of swimming, biking, running, strength training and nutrition.

Most athletes are doing heat training wrong.

Somewhere along the way, athletes started believing that more heat, more suffering, and more sweat automatically meant more adaptation.

That’s not how physiology works.

Heat training adds stress on top of your existing training load. Used correctly, that stress can improve plasma volume, thermoregulation, and cardiovascular efficiency.

Used poorly?
It becomes another recovery cost.

This is where many athletes go wrong:
They finish a massive long ride or hard interval day, then pile on aggressive heat exposure because they think more stress equals more gain.

But adaptation doesn’t happen from accumulating stress alone. It happens when your body can absorb that stress and recover from it.

The goal of heat training isn’t to get as hot as possible.

The goal is to create a controlled thermal stimulus. High enough to drive adaptation. Low enough to avoid excessive systemic fatigue.

The best athletes don’t chase maximum suffering. They chase maximum adaptation with minimum unnecessary cost.

Heat training is a powerful tool.
But like every tool in performance coaching, dose matters!

Two swimmers, the same day, much different thoughts on swimming! One is deep in a block, the other is ready to race.

Swimming is probably the sport that feels the worst when you're carrying fatigue.

You can usually get through an easy run or spin on tired legs and still feel somewhat normal. In the pool, fatigue tends to show up much faster. Your stroke feels disconnected, you lose your feel for the water, and suddenly you're wondering where all your fitness went.

Before jumping to conclusions, look at the previous 3-7 days of training.

Did you just complete a hard run workout? A long ride? Several days of accumulated stress?

Triathlon is one sport. The fatigue you create in one discipline doesn't stay there. It affects how you move, coordinate, and perform across all three.

Too many athletes have one bad swim and immediately start questioning their technique or fitness. More often than not, the swim is simply exposing fatigue that's already there.

There is a time to swim fast and feel great in the water. The goal is to have those days show up when they matter most, which is close to race day, when freshness allows your fitness and confidence to come through.

One or even TWO off day(s) in the pool isn't a sign that everything is heading in the wrong direction. Sometimes it's just a reminder that training is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.