By: Jay Campbell Swim, Bike, Run …. Do well at all three and you will be a good triathlete. But to be a great triathlete, you need to master what some call the ‘4th discipline’, the transition. How important is the transition? It becomes more important in shorter races. In a 600 minute race (10 hours) the difference between a 2 minute and a 4 minute transition is less than a 1% improvement…so not that important. But if you are doing supersprint races (~30 minutes), that would be a 13% improvement! Just to prove that I know what I am talking about, here are the top-10 fastest T1 + T2 times at the 2023 Eagle Lake Triathlon, a ‘sprint’ distance
By: Donald Smith Hello, my name is Donald Smith from Brighton, MI. I am 13 years old and am in 8th grade. I am currently homeschooled and go to a co-op for electives and other classes. I like homeschooling because it allows me the freedom to ride outside whenever I want. I live right across from Island Lake State Park, so I can ride there from my house. The addiction of cycling hit me when I was 5 years old and my dad had to constantly take me mountain biking, riding a short loop on blue over and over again. My dad has been riding forever and it is something we like to do together…and honestly, I did not enjoy
By: Natalie Rowe A few weeks ago, Athletic Mentors hosted their Swim Stroke Video Analysis. There were 12 of us that participated, many of us fairly experienced swimmers…but after watching the videos, we all had technique issues, mostly hand entry and catch issues. Just to give you an idea, I grabbed an image from one of my videos to show you what we saw under the water. When we met and reviewed our videos as a group, we started talking about the upcoming racing season, training and triathlon in general. It got me thinking…we were all beginners at some point and pretty clueless about all things triathlon. I thought it would be fun if a few experienced triathletes answered some
By: Jay Campbell If you are a Zwifter, you may have experienced a bit of bike-envy when a glowing-neon-bike came in and out of your view. That neon bike is commonly known as the “Tron” bike and formally referred to as the “Zwift Concept Z1 Bike.” It is colorful and it is fast. This article will divulge some hacks to unlock your Tron Bike quicker. Author’s avatar on his Zwift Concept Z1 (Tron) bike on top of the Radio Tower climb with Alpe du Zwift in the background. He accumulated 65% of the 164,000 feet of elevation in the final 7 weeks. The hacks enabled increased weekly-elevations of 7113, 6115, 14547, 16710, 15925, 21512, and 24540 feet. Image used by permission
By:Katja Opfer My first season on TAMJD got off to a bit of a rough start when I broke my thumb at my high school ski team’s training camp in early January. While my ski racing season ended before it even began, this meant that I had a lot of time to train and build up base miles in Zwift. Breaking my thumb reinforced my belief that everything happens for a reason, because having all that time to train set me up well going into the cycling season and it paid off. My fitness was better than ever before and I had a great time at the team’s spring training camp in North Carolina, where I got to do some
Two powerful studies, published in highly respected medical journals, followed almost 900,000 subjects for a number of years and concluded that higher VO2 max was associated with lower mortality across all fitness levels. And while there seemed to be no upper limit to the benefits of aerobic fitness (CRF), the impact of lower aerobic fitness on longevity was clearly similar to commonly recognized comorbidities: “ Increased Cardiorespiratory Fitness (CRF) was associated with reduced long-term mortality (death by any cause) with no observed upper limit of benefit. The adjusted mortality risk of reduced CRF was greater than or equal to traditional clinical risk factors, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and smoking. Extreme aerobic fitness (CRF ≥ 2 SDs above the mean
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