Lucy Charles Barclay & Reece Barclay - #009

0:00Good morning guys, welcome. Lucy, Reece, thank you for coming in today. How has your morning been? Yeah, it's been good. We're slightly different mornings. Yeah, I've just rocked out of bed and here I am. You've already done training. I was up at five, got swimming, got home, quickly dried my hair, did my makeup on the train and found a gluten-free croissant. So yeah, winning. Winning. When you say swim, how far have you done this morning? we did four kilometers this morning with about 2 000 meters of threshold work so so just just an easy morning yeah yeah pretty easy standard morning um the next oldest kid that i swim with i think is 16 so i feel quite old when i train with them in the morning but they they keep me on my toes so it's good oh that's cool that's cool i want to start this podcast by taking it back to when i first actually met you in person and it was in boston at a whoop event and i was just shocked to how normal you guys seemed obviously I've watched you from afar for years and years and I've looked up to you obviously being the best guys in your sport I just found it crazy how normal you were you you didn't have egos you you just I don't know you was asking questions you was interested in other people's lives how do you kind of like stay grounded yeah I think we we're both I guess quite down to earth we've got a lot of friends that are just normal and we came into this sport as kind of real amateurs so because we've built our way up from the bottom I think we know what it's like at the bottom and then yeah just gradually chipped our way along and tried to stay I guess quite normal and always want to learn and we're always inspired by other athletes that want to know about their training and yeah I guess we're always interested yeah I think that's probably like one of the main things is we still probably view ourselves as amateurs because on the grand scheme of things, we've not been doing triathlon our whole lives.

1:56We've stepped into it. So, oh, that's my stomach, I'm hungry. I think we're wanting to talk to people and learn from other areas as well. Because probably the best lessons we ever learn in our sport is speaking to people in different sports, finding out how they do things. And yeah, I just got speaking to you because I was fascinated with High Rocks. Obviously, it's fairly new. I think the last two three years it's gone mental um Lucy I think you actually described it as a little bromance going on I did I think that's what you explained because we were just nerding out about uh I was just asking Reece questions he was asking me questions about our sports and uh yeah kindly you reached out afterwards and you offered to coach me and help me because you realized because hyrox is such a new sport there's so many kind of keys that you could unlock low pieces of hang what's the same hanging fruit yeah low hanging fruit uh that we could have uh taken and i've i've listened to you and you've educated me so much and i'll remember everything that you've taught me because it was kind of like a huge stepping stone for me oh cheers yeah i think it was like you know i can't really take much credit for what you've done it's it's crazy but I just wanted to help in a small way um you know you you work so incredibly hard but there was just from listening to you in Boston there was loads of things that we could just tweak very easily and it would make a huge difference um but yeah you what you've done with that everyone said that you couldn't do sub 230 marathon and then you said right screw it I'm going to go sub 220 and then everyone was like wow you this guy's away with the fairies he's never going to do that but just from listening to you and watching you train for I think it was a week in Lanzarote I thought you know what he can he can do this um and all right we fell a little bit short but you're so close and I've honestly anyone who says anything derogatory about that is just jealous of what you've achieved um and we've had that in our career as well people put you down because they don't like what you're doing or you're coming from a different angle and then And when you go and do it, it's so much better to look at those people and say, hey, you said I couldn't do this.

4:13I think you had that attitude as well, a little bit wanting to prove. Certainly from speaking to you, there was a lot of people who said that you will never be able to do this. You don't come from a run background. And that made me more motivated to want to work with you as well, because I was like, yes, I know what it's like to be told you can't do something because you've had that your career and you were sort of on the same trajectory. Can we go into that? like how how has that been because obviously before you achieved becoming a champion you had a lot of second places and obviously a lot of people kind of put you down along that way how did you guys take that yeah I think my my whole career I've kind of had it obviously my background was in swimming and I got very close to making the Olympic Games in London and and didn't quite make it and then try to go for another four years for the next games but I was never really very much supported by the governing body of swimming so it always felt like I was trying to do it on my own and even I've had coaches at the time that were like you're not going to do this even though like I would outperform everyone I was training against and really the only person that always believed in me was Reece and was like you'll be able to do this like if you just do this training you can get here and then we made the jump together over to triathlon and we had almost the exact same scenario where I wanted to get my professional license and it was rejected and I appealed it and eventually got it on a trial basis and within the space of one year of being a professional I was coming second in the world and they didn't even want to give me the license to begin with and then obviously then coming second four times at the world championships and started to get the title of the bridesmaid that she's never going to win this what's it going to take she's always going to be second and in my mind I was like well it's still amazing to come second in the world like who can do that four times but obviously deep down I was so motivated to get that win and mostly it came from internally wanting it knowing the work that we're putting in together but then there is this bit on the side that's like everyone's saying you can't do it and you just even more want to prove them wrong so you can turn that into a positive way of thinking like actually if this motivates me to get out of bed and train every day it can't be that bad a thing So, yeah, when you get told you can't do something, it's best to ignore it.

6:32But if you can use it as motivation, then that's great as well. Yeah, I think even sometimes the narrative sticks with the media. So the media would say Lucy came second in the world, she's fallen short. But they'll talk about another athlete who's come fifth and said they've had the best day, they've come top five. So it's like what you said, second in the world is amazing. Obviously, you want that top step. but then everyone starts saying oh you're never going to do it and even the media start jumping on that and you know creating second in the world as a failure is yeah so you were held to insane standards by that point and then that obviously adds pressure um and I think the same thing is true in your side like you you openly came out and said I want to hit 220 which is ludicrous by most people's standards that adds pressure because you've gone public with it I really respected that and I thought that was brave.

7:24I still think you can do it. Yeah, we're going to give it another shot, I think, later this year, maybe Berlin. Yeah. But yeah, and I remember actually, we were at the Rebel offices. They've kind of let us use the podcast studio and Ben, our current athlete managers, he explained the first time he met you. Okay, go on. And I think he went for a walk with you and he mentioned that you was just different and you he knew that you was going to be something special how i don't know it might reese it might be better you explaining this but uh what is that difference is it just kind of confidence is it like a self-belief or is it just you work hard and that's the thing yeah i mean i don't know i can't i can't imagine what ben saw on a dog walk which would have been i don't know my extreme handling of my dogs yeah i don't know what he was he's got a real eye for talent um but yeah in training i think it's quite obvious when you look at lucy training she goes from she can literally be bubbly on the side of the deck um on the on the swimming pool deck talking to you as we are now and then she puts her goggles on dives in and it's like the external well doesn't matter anymore i'm focusing on my training and she's extremely driven you've been like that for for as long as i've never known you it's interesting we come from a background in swimming where in our in our cohort of swimmers there was some of the best in the world Olympic medalists Commonwealth Games champions national champions record holders everything in one swimming pool you had so much talent but you always stood out purely because of your work ethic I think you was one of the the ones that would literally be pulled out of the pool killing yourself more than anyone else including all the champions that were in there and I noticed that from the day I met you that if um if we were given a set to failure you would undoubtedly be the last one standing and actually the coach tested us on a few times with that so yeah you've got something different mentality when you train uh but in everyday life i i you know if you were just walking down the street and someone bumped into you i went nine times out of ten they don't know who you are they they don't know that you're a world champion and you've got that mentality so yeah i don't know what he saw that was different on a dog walk but it's interesting yeah i think i mean like you said on the confidence thing i think every athlete will have some confidence in their self but everyone will also experience self-doubt and i definitely will have that i know i gain a lot of confidence from my training which I think is why I train so hard because I'm like every session that I do and I smash it and I'm like wow I'm making progress it just gives me confidence kind of like evidence yeah exactly so then you can look back at that I always before competition I will look back at my training be like well look you nailed that you smashed that that's got better surely if you can just do what you've done in training on the race course you're going to have a good result obviously anything can happen but you've done the work to deserve it and that's got to give you some confidence for sure i think nowadays though it's now you're a full-time professional athlete it's yes you have that skill set to train really hard but it's actually putting that in a locker and using it when it's needed but nine times out of ten the training needs to just be regulated ticking the boxes and you save that what you've got for either the race course or you know the odd session where it's like okay lucy you really got to nail this now we're doing a test and you you always do deliver but sometimes you're your own worst enemy you want to be hitting the best session you've ever hit always um and inevitably as a as a full-time athlete that can lead to overtraining and injury so i think sometimes my job is to regulate your enthusiasm and unleash it when it's when it's necessary to do so yeah i love how well you work as a team and I first kind of like saw that if we fast forward from when I first met you in Boston to we was out you was out training you was doing a training camp in Lanzarote I think you've just come off the back of an altitude camp and then you went into heat training training in Lanzarote and what shocked me was I thought I trained hard I'd spoken to quite a few professional runners and I thought they trained hard and then I came to a clubless answer Lanzarote and witnessed you just a day training and i was just watching from the sidelines and i was like we we we are amateurs compared to lucy the the amount of detail uh just to put it into perspective we're in lanzarote it was beautiful weather outside me and reese had just gone on a bike ride we come back from the bike ride and lucy is sat indoors on a turbo trainer in a sweatsuit with i think it must have you've been you've you made the the temperature hot in the room yeah and you was in this really controlled environment and just the the fact that you wasn't outside cycling you was indoors and you know literally in the pain cave and i think you was that i think you was on like a two-hour heat session ride and then that was just kind of like beginning you was on swimming after and everything else it was probably training training like five to six hours a day and then i spoke to reese and he was like he explained you're now going to go sit in uh 90 for 90 minutes in a hyperbaric chamber and then you're going to go and eat and then you're going to go to bed get nine hours and it's kind of rinse and repeat every single day like you guys train harder than anyone else and i don't know whether that's all of the kind of like triathlon world or if that's just you or if you yeah i think that probably does make the difference but it's crazy the amount yeah I think I mean triathlon is a ridiculous sport there's this mentality of more is better and I think that's where Rhys comes in and tries to make it as time efficient and specific as possible hence why I'm riding indoors in a sweatsuit and not going out into the sunshine where I'd much rather be often it's not glamorous at all like it's brutal when yeah you're sweating in a sweatsuit and just trying to get on with it and then you know you've got to swim after and everything else but it's yeah I guess it's dialing it all in making sure you're fueling properly getting the recovery in you're using all the methods that we have um and actually yes to an extent more is better but there is a fine line between what some athletes are doing which whether they're actually doing it or not whether on social media they're saying they're doing 35 40 hour training weeks or whether that includes the time spent doing mobility and stretching and senior physio is that included in that time we don't know but i think it's finding that right balance for you of how much you actually need to do and I'd say like 30 hours is like as much the absolute peak of what I would need to do in training for an Ironman throughout the year and I wouldn't do that for many weeks maybe I'll be doing that on that training camp but then other times in the year I might only be training 15 hours a week and spending more time doing the mobility and those kind of things that sometimes will drop off when the hours go up but yeah it's a pretty ridiculous sport um i mean ironman is a ridiculous event so the training has to be but um yeah we have to be a bit crazy to do that much the the funniest thing i thought about the whole thing about watching you train was you had a smile on your face no matter what you were like so so bubbly you just sat in the sweatsuit and you know we came and had a conversation and you were just so happy is it always like that or is there some days where you're literally like peeling yourself out of bed you don't want to train maybe reese has to get you to train um is is that the situation or you are you always kind of fired up and ready to go there's definitely days where you don't want to get out of bed like you're so tired i mean even this morning it's so hard when i train at home i'm pretty much up at five every morning by one by one to to get swimming in so you don't always want to do that especially in the winter and it's dark and cold but then i think if you've got a goal that's clear enough then you have that reasoning of why you're getting out of bed and I try and make everything as fun as possible so like when we look absolutely ridiculous in a sweatsuit I just have to laugh about it and go actually it's quite funny but the session's gonna get hard within 15 minutes and then trying to keep the smile on your face becomes more difficult but I think if you can go into a session with good energy you'll get a lot more from it there's definitely sessions where I go in and I'm maybe I'm stressed from something else in my life and And Rhys is like, maybe we need to adapt the session because if you're already feeling stressed, how are you going to hit this session?

16:05So here's a good call of my emotional state, I think. Yeah, particularly running. Sometimes now if Lucy's stressed for whatever reason, we just and there's a run session on the plan. It's just been it because running stressed has always led to problems with you. So but yeah, I think for the most part, you enjoy it. obviously getting up at 5am no one enjoys that but the worst part is getting up once you're there it's not too bad um and you always feel righteous afterwards i guess you've you've done a session banked it by 7am already and going back to your point about training hours um you saw us in the peak of lucy's kona prep so i think that was an abnormal time even for lucy that was like absolute peak um and you would have been doing 30 hours of pure cardio a week what's what's that looking like so if we talk about kind of like a typical week of training when you're peaking for a race yeah so let's say like 30 hours of cardiovascular stimulus but then you layer on top gym mobility recovery it's it's it's nine to five either training or recovering from training um using all different methods you know hyperbaric chamber massaging foam rolling you you actually mentioned that it takes you so long to pack up when you when you go to a training camp from club of santa you've actually got like a lockup where you you can't physically take all your stuff home uh obviously they have right chambered way too much anyway yeah you've got a locker that you go and put yourself in and i remember you i think you decided to race so you left club of santa early and it took you like a full afternoon to to pack up yeah we've we're very fortunate club of santa have given us a lockup area i think over the course of the last 10 years every time we go out there we fly another training equipment out there and we go oh you know what we could just leave that here so we haven't got to bring it next time and now it's accumulated into literally a big you know like cargo container worth of stuff uh thank you club la santa but yeah it's um it's it's full on like any kind of you know i hate to use the saying marginal gain but it is true in in in triathlon particularly because it's three different sports there's three different areas to gain marginal gains and they add up to so much every attention to detail is is massive um you know like your swimming background helps you so much in the water but when we came into this triathlon cycling running is a completely new world um we learned the hard way very quickly that you can't apply the same mindset of swimming to running because you just get injured and we learned probably naturally about the importance of aerodynamics on the bike i guess we can touch on that but i think we're i don't even think we're scratching the surface of what's possible in in our sport um so you still think there's like real areas of improvement huge like every single year lucy's got better when you look at the the raw data of her performance every single year she's got better and that just wouldn't be possible if you were already second in the world stepping into something 10 years ago if the sport was fully developed because making that jump from second to first in a sport like running for example that's been going for 100 years now there's not really much you can do to bridge that gap whereas in a sport that's young and in its infancy and really triathlon is sort of in its infancy every single year there's like times tumbling the times lucy's doing now would have won the men's time when we first started the sport i think there was only a few people that gone under eight hours in the men's field for a full distance now they're talking about women doing it probably this year maybe next year which is absurd um and yeah the time that you your record time that won kona uh craig alexander uh won kona when we very first started triathlon and he was only two minutes quicker than your time that won it in 2023 so if we rewind 10 years you would have been competitive in the men's field which has all come from technical technology development training development recovery development nutrition development it's just you know the super shoes the aerodynamics it's just absurd the amount of things that you can improve on um and like i said i still think we're only scratching the surface of that so it's a fascinating time to be an athlete yeah so back to kind of like the the week if we just lay out i know every single week's different but like a monday to sunday what kind of training are we doing yeah so like having said what i just said you got to then like go okay you could go crazy and try and do everything because there's so much to do you've got to consolidate it into what are you focusing on now um and i guess so lucy has a coach dan larang who's probably one of the best if not the best in the business he's coached Jan Frodeno, multiple Ironman world champion, Olympic champion.

21:04So he sets the direction where we're going in the training. And then I will be on deck to try and help Lucy deliver that. So he will say, right, this week we're doing an aerobic focus. I need Lucy to be working in this zone, that zone, and I'll make sure everything is calibrated towards that feedback, the information to him I guess it's um week on week he doesn't tend to set training months in advance because in triathlon I think and in most endurance sports the accumulation of fatigue you can't plan four weeks ahead you can have a direction where you're going but when you're doing that level of volume I think you have to be adaptive week on week that's why we like to go to a training environment like Club La Santa where it's very controlled you haven't got any external noise um you can just focus on training and recovery.

21:55I don't think there's been a single week in the last 10 years where we haven't had to adapt to training. I always say this and I said it to you, what looks good on paper isn't necessarily what's best for you in the real world. So you can have an outline of what you want to do. But I see so many athletes make the same mistake where they're like a slave to their training peaks or their calendar. They're like, right, I've said I'm going to do this. I have to do this you can't do that when you're training at that level you have to say okay that was the plan but I'm too tired or I really nailed that last session therefore I should probably think about recovering for the next one um and that's that's basically my job day-to-day adapting what the overall plan is set by your coach but day-to-day nuances of it change and then you haven't got to focus and you trust in what I say and you just get on with it and that's what you're extremely good at as well you're not like oh well I was meant to do 100k of running this week and now I'm going to do 95 is the plan out the window no some athletes would and I do I have coached some athletes that can't handle that you're very good at just going okay well you know 5k here or I've missed a swim there it's not the end of the world do you think that's down to confidence in and like past experience of potentially pushing yourself too much and getting injured yeah I think it's it's a combination of things so when I'm in a period where I am now where I'm coming back from a surgery and I'm not where I want to be I can be a lot worse because I'm like I cannot afford to miss sessions because I am behind but then I guess kind of when you observe me in Club of Santa I'm at peak fitness I know I'm basically where I need to be and I'm not really going to drop off I'm if anything I just need to not get injured not get sick I need to just maintain and then having Rhys do what he does almost takes the guilt away when he's like actually you can cut the session short there or you can skip that session because you've done the stimulus for today i think if i didn't have that i might go away and feel a bit of guilt like oh i've missed that session should i just go and do it but ultimately i trust reese and he's like you don't need to do it i'm like okay forget about it let's go eat dinner like happy day so i think for your audience watching this probably saying how do i take something from that my advice would be recalibrate your goal so that you don't have stress towards it if you suddenly get time constraint life gets in the way recalibrate it so that you're still enjoying the process or push it back because if you're not on target and you're not on time you can give yourself time by recalibrating the target or moving the target slightly back okay fine if there's the london marathon for example and that's the date and you've done all this training and all of a sudden you get an injury that's terrible but that is also part of sport but if there's like a different goal where you're like okay i want to hit x amount of time i want to do a 220 marathon in your case it always gets stressful as you approach the deadline and suddenly you're like not quite on target then you start not enjoying the training yeah you start stressing about the training and that actually makes the performance less so I think you can like recalibrate it to okay that's just a stepping stone I might not hit it this time but I'm going to get it down the line and all of a sudden your mind your mind shifts you're like okay yeah well that's the target but it's the eventual target it's not the be all and end all obviously at the professional level you have the world championship deadline so it adds a layer onto it but for your general audience I think there's always another start line and there's always another time that you can get those goals as soon as you start making it unenjoyable you're in a doom loop of not achieving that and making it stressful interesting and kind of like a daily routine so your daily routine do you like to swim early doors you swim at night is there a specific order that you you like to do the three uh components of your sport swim bike run yeah generally we'll start the day of a swim because it's really the one that takes the most time I've got to drive to the pool do the session and drive back and me swimming in a public pool isn't ever going to go well so I always swim with a swim squad and do whatever session they're doing I have really good relationship with the coach so if I need to work on something specific then they can adapt the session to that and we're quite lucky we swim with a junior squad and a master's squad so we have like a good mix of swimming with the young and up-and-coming kids that are just like don't let them kick our ass because they're really young and then we swim with the masters group that are our age so we actually can chat with them and talk about normal life which is really nice they're really good so we have a really good mix there um and i guess it kind of makes sense to do swim first because it's the first bit of a triathlon so i always do that one first come home have some breakfast walk the dogs so we can take our mind off training for a bit um then normally i'll either have a bike or a run session um which if it's a bike it can be up to three hours it can be up to five hours if it's a big ironman block um then there might be a brick run off of that um which would just be an easy run and then probably a strength session sometimes back in the pool sometimes back in the pool again generally the most I'll train in one day is three times um we try and do if it's two solid sessions and it's only two if it's free probably only one of them is actually going to be a solid workout um interesting and how many times you're hitting three sessions a day like per week is that just like once maybe every other day is like a double day is there any complete rest days a single day yeah at the moment so as i'm building up fitness there'd probably be like two days a week that i've got three sessions when i'm in a big kona block there could be four to five days that i've got three sessions and that's when it's really getting brutal because you also have to be really time efficient so that you've got enough recovery between the sessions what I quite like to do is if it's an easy run and I have a bike I'll make it one session so although it's like a bike and a run session I'll just make it a big brick workout so then it's still more like two sessions so you can actually fit recovery and eating around it yeah that was um we had a we did a seminar actually Monday I think we were speaking to um university students and they were asking kind of like what style of training we do polarized threshold I think when you go to that level of training it automatically becomes quite polarized um because you're doing such high volume and then that's when it's really you have to be strict your easy is your easy stuff and your hard work is your hard work stuff when you're not doing as high volume then it's a little bit more threshold and if you could just explain the difference between obviously that threshold and polarized yeah so polarized is like the 80 of your training would be zone two or less and 20 would be really high intensity so threshold or above um so that that is polarized you're doing easy and hard and threshold training sort of sits somewhere in the middle where you're training predominantly in zone four or if you're using lactate lt2 um they're different methods some people you know norwegians are they call it the norwegian method because they do threshold in the morning and threshold in the evening that we literally had like a two-hour debate on what's what's the right answer and um yeah spoiler alert there isn't one it's all individual to each person and the circumstances they're in but your training moves through different phases depending on how much volume you're doing yeah interesting i was actually uh speaking to some runners that do the norwegian training method and i i was actually speaking to uh the guys and they were saying that they say it's threshold and when they're going up to lt2 lactate threshold 2 when they go up to that because they're so efficient with running that is almost like a vo2 max session and it's kind of in the same ballpark because they can run at 95 of of their top speed yeah at for an hour or longer because they're so efficient at running so yeah it's an incredibly demanding session like when you're an elite athlete trying to do threshold is almost as hard as doing vo2 max because yeah you can run or do whatever sport you're doing at such a high rev level and it takes i think it'll probably take more out of few guys doing a fresh old session than an amateur doing a fresh old session yeah interesting and then when do you like recover obviously you sleep's a huge one i've never spoke to any athlete that's said that sleep's not important how many hours are we talking about i mean i do aim for eight hours but i don't really feel good unless i've had like 10 hours sleep um which is really hard when you're up at five because it means you have to go to bed pretty early and the knock-on effect like i think we competed on sunday and then we had a later night and i knew i had to be up at five for swimming and then the knock-on effect of not having a great night's sleep was like until thursday i felt tired from that so it's like just not really worth the sacrifice so like most evenings around eight o 'clock i'm like i'm gonna go to bed now because which is hard for me because i'm not doing all this training so you want to stay off yeah i'm laying in bed at eight o 'clock wide awake they're thinking well life's great yeah i mean we've bought blackout blinds now because in the summer and not long from now it's going to be you know birds tweeting sun's out and we're laying in the garden next door and we're going to bed yeah it's rock and roll dogs enjoy it though they're like they sleep yeah i love this and can we go into a little bit more about like the procedures that you have have you done any have you tried the altitude tents anything like that do you do you use them yeah we've tried everything um altitude tents real life altitudes they all have their place they all work um heat training ice baths everything you name it we've done it um i think they all have their place like i said it's like marginal gains on everything i think when you can go crazy and try and do everything at once you don't really know what's working what's not i think you have to be quite methodical add one thing at a time um see if it works there's some concurrent stuff so you can do heat and altitude um you can do some stuff where it's like altitude into heat that's what we've done in the in the uh last year and you had some good performances yeah we could go into that there's there's so many things you could be doing that's crazy but how how do you on like a a relationship basis like how do you guys manage that because i know my girlfriend emily she said we are not getting an altitude tent like you already take your mouth up you wear an eye mask we go to bed at 8 p.m we're not sleeping in an altitude tent she said that is it that's the final that's the line like obviously i don't know reese are you encouraging this lucy is it you do you have any like arguments when like training gets stressful like well i think the so altitude 10 is horrible to sleep in i don't know if you've ever slept in one but it gets really hot yeah so like there'll be times where and you you like to be warm when you're for the most part i think i'm more switching to i like being cold as well so yeah yeah which is which does we've got the eight sleep mattress as well now they're a game changer yeah they are brilliant for anyone that doesn't know it's a mattress that is well it's split into two sides and you can control the temperatures separately yeah so like you say lucy if you want if you want to be nice and warm toasty warm you can set it to to be uh warmer and reach you can have it cooler it's pretty cool i think that's been saving marriages isn't it so good yeah um i forgot what the question was altitude yeah it's not enjoyable i mean it's particularly if you're not training your you know your sleep quality goes down for you as well though right free fitness to do what right like training programs it's like i don't need more red blood cells to uh to do calendars but yeah it's a necessary compromise i would say there's many of those yeah i also think though like with the altitude tent if it's no it's nowhere near as good as real life altitude no and actually i don't even know if you get much benefit from sleeping it's good for like pre-altitude camp um but for loose like actually everyone is different but for lucy you have to be at a certain altitude as well um so we've done training camps where the altitude level's not been quite high enough and basically got no stimulus what we're talking there what so for for loose it needs to be above 2000 uh for me it was like 1700 i was already getting a benefit and actually my performance was dropped off quite significantly at that altitude where you didn't even notice it i think that's quite a good telltale sign actually if you go up to an altitude camp at say 1800 meters and you're not struggling not that you should struggle but you're probably not getting the benefit um as soon as you start feeling that breathlessness and you notice it you're probably getting the benefit everyone else is everyone's different as well so what have you got a favorite place as well where you like to go so we like font remote um purely because logistics of that we drive there um it's not quite high enough for Lucy though so it's beneficial but not as beneficial as say Sierra Nevada which is 2400 that's where a lot of the Norwegians train that's really beneficial but it's also quite boring up there it's very remote there's nothing there so you feel like you're going on boot camp there's no distraction which even in Lanzarote like you can go and eat lunch at a cafe or eat at a restaurant and it feels a bit more like you're training but you've got a bit of holiday feel to it whereas if you go and train in sierra nevado it's like prison camp and what is that trade-off like like you say you're not going to be as happy there you you're going to think it's a camp it's kind of almost like a chore because there's nothing else to do but train and like you say when you're at that high altitude training sucks like it's harder it's harder to sleep it's harder when does it become kind of where's that line where like enjoying training and being able to get a really good night's sleep and then the kind of benefits of altitude where does that lie for you is there like a point where you'll you won't sacrifice like your enjoyment maybe like you say front remote where you can take the dogs and you can have or you can bring your family yeah um where would you much prefer that and do you benefit from that rather than the trade-off of like killing everything and just going up to altitude and having a boring life yeah I think it depends on the time of the year and like what you're working towards so we do our font remote camp if we do it more in the summer before before the championship season but not in that final block before it so it worked really well for me last year we did a block there dropped in and I raced to 100 London and got the win so it did work well but it was really a really nice balance like it didn't feel completely like a training camp we had my family there the dogs there and it was like that real enjoyment factor which I feel like I got a lot from it there's times in the year where I'm willing to like go all in but I think it's like it could only be like a three month long camp maybe in Sierra because it's yeah I think because of the Ironman World Championships being in Hawaii every year we always prioritize heat training over altitude training um so with that we don't do a big altitude block going into the world champs we normally do a heat training block and we like to keep them separate because there's too many variables when you try and do a heat and altitude training block so i think if kona wasn't kona we probably would do more high altitude training but because the heat element of kona is the deciding factor really we focus on that more than the altitude i want to move on to that so kona this year uh you like say i witnessed a week of you training and but you spent so long in kind of like this training block where we are training for kona you're training you know six seven eight hours a day and then you're you're recovering on top of that literally your whole life dedicated to one day yeah and then that day didn't go to plan how do you come back from that oh that's a really good question i i think when i when it obviously happened so those who don't know um i've made it like eight hours into race seven and a half hours into the race uh by the way it was incredible to watch like we was watching uh and it it was crazy were you in second place both 15 minutes in front of third place yeah so myself and taylor nib we were we established the lead of 15 minutes over third place and anyone watching was that what was going to come down to lucy or taylor then and and i think uh solvig was in the middle okay so she It was maybe a bit closer than 15 minutes, the eventual winner.

38:56And I'd felt a little bit weird all day, to be honest. But I think as athletes, or certainly I can do this, I'm really good at lying to myself when I don't feel good in a race. I'll be like, it's fine. You're going to be great. It's going to come around. It's totally fine. Ignore it. And then it got to the point where I couldn't really ignore it anymore. And I knew I didn't feel right to the point where I was like... And you was on the run at this point. Yeah, I was on the run at this point. I was like running all over the road confused I felt freezing but we've seen Hawaii which is boiling so I was like that's not right um to the point where Rhys managed to get to me and stop me from racing which I knew was the right call in that moment and obviously in that moment you're devastated you know the months of work that have gone into it and it's brutal but then And a part of me was like, this would be so much worse if I hadn't won this race before.

39:48The fact that I had won it, I was like, well, at least you have done that in your career. And we'd had a lot going on in our life with family members being unwell and Rhys' grandad passed away not long after that race. And it kind of the perspective of health really came into the forefront of that, actually. But I'm still healthy. I'm still here. This is actually more important. and I'm going to race again, I've got so many more opportunities to do this, that has to take precedence over sacrificing my health to try and win something. So, yeah, a lot of perspective was at play there. And, yeah, I'm not going to say I didn't cry.

40:25I wasn't devastated for, like, 24 hours. And then we were out. I don't think it was just, it wasn't just you that cried. I think people watching the videos online, like, honestly, it was, I think everyone was welling up at that video. Yeah, I think we had a lot of heartbreak around the world. but um yeah I think within like 24 48 hours we were like right how can we make this right there's another world championships in four weeks time if you haven't damaged your health in this moment obviously we're going to get home we're going to get you checked we're going to get you back training see what's happening and I got back home and kind of settled back into training I knew I didn't have to train hard for very long I knew the incredible shape I had gone into that race was like well I haven't lost anything I still race for seven and a half hours for god's sake like I'm gonna got some fitness from that so get home get back training actually felt pretty good and i was like well you know we've got to do is keep this going for a few more weeks you've got another chance so i was very motivated in that time i think going back to the point we were talking about earlier where people writing you off i've been completely written off people like she's never gonna race again because of what she's done to herself let alone line up in four weeks it's impossible like she's ruined herself and and and taylor had the same as well the american people had written her off both yeah lucy and taylor were like oh they're never gonna race again and yeah yeah so i think we both went away and sort of obviously we had varying levels of things that happened to us in the race so i can't speak for taylor but for me i was like okay i feel like i've recovered from what happened i can get back into training we'll take it steady to begin with but the numbers were still there and i'm still really really confident and but i just stayed quite quiet I was like okay well I can probably capitalise on the fact that everyone thinks that I'm done and that I'm never going to line up so they didn't even really know that I was going to line up until the last minute and I was there with a I went there with a different attitude I normally go there and I have a bit of confidence but I never really shout about it whereas this was like I'm actually really confident but I'm going to say nothing and I'm going to go here and I'm just gonna try and go all in and see what happens and I just felt confident that I could actually win it and ended up being a really good day like it was the best way to turn around that disappointment and I also have said before like if I'd gone to Kona and just won it oh it would have been great I would have had so much emotion on the finish line I would have been happy but the emotion I had on that finish line four weeks later because I'd been so devastated four weeks earlier i was like i never would have felt that elation and excitement running down the finish line in kona but to know what i'd come from to then win was like it was i couldn't control it like the excitement pouring out of me and yeah it's just one of those moments you wish you could just bottle up and then like when you're feeling a bit down open it up and be like this is this is why we do this oh it was crazy it was crazy to witness um what a comeback um but for the people out there like especially if you're doing like triathlon ironman marathons whatever it is there's so many things that can go wrong that are out of your control yeah like you say you was you was racing in corner obviously you can prepare for the direct sunlight for that many hours but at the end of the day like it's it's still going to be there and you dnf in that race may been out of your control like it so i i literally watched it and the amount of like ice packs and stuff that were out on course like you could not do anything else like you went out and that's an intensity and you just couldn't continue that and to the point where you was literally delirious and like you say health was a risk but but uh i feel like the the importance of after that reassessing and setting another goal i feel like it's so important like things may not go your way in a race you might have trained all this time but it's not the end of the world if it doesn't go your race and you you probably did learn did you learn anything from that race did you kind of like assess anything between the two of you like what went wrong what went right what we're going to take into this next race like if you would have just won do you think the outcome would have been different four weeks later yeah that's a good question yeah yeah when we basically well we won't give everything away because we've got the world champs this year but yes we learn a lot from that um hopefully we won't make the same mistake twice it was our fault we did do something that you know can be corrected um but we won't give that completely away but yeah that's sport that's why people watch if everyone just submitted their training profile and said here you go that's how much training i've done no one would watch it.

45:01Yeah, hand me the medal. That's entertainment. And, you know, sadly, sometimes health and entertainment can be intertwined in not so much a good way. But I think the main lessons learned from that were there always is another star line. There's always something more that can be done. And even at the very top level, we make mistakes. So, yeah, I think like what you said, coming back from that you'll never have that experience by just winning something the first time it's like overcoming adversity in such a small amount of time as well going from you know you spend your whole life training for that one event seven and a half hours in it was almost like oh I'm gonna win this and then very quickly you're in a medical tent it's like it's like someone just pulled the rug from underneath your feet then a month later you're back on the start line and you've won a world championship it's a crazy low high roller coaster um and i completely agree with you i think that's that finish line in marbella was probably the most emotional finish line we've ever had um how does it feel like for you reese like being on the sidelines and watching and not being able to kind of obviously you've been in that position yourself but like not obviously you can support as much as you can you can prepare as much as you can but when it comes down to that race day like how does it feel like when you don't know what's going to happen and you have no impact like you you do feel a bit helpless like there's there's nothing i can do i'm not allowed to help lucy um for those who don't know as a triathlon coach you can't help your athlete at all in the race it's an instant dq if i'm seen to be helping lucy um so yeah at the point where I was trying to get to Lucy on the race course, I was having an argument with the security because they were saying, if you go in there and get Lucy, she'll be DQ'd.

46:58Like I was like, at that point, I don't care. Her health is more important. I just ignored them and went through. So I guess in my mind, I'd already decided that your race was finished because technically they could have disqualified her. But from a coaching perspective, there's nothing I'm allowed to do, which does make you feel like you've got your hands tied behind your back. It's a horrible experience because you're invested with the athlete. Like I'm there every single step of the way with her. And then all of a sudden that gun goes off and you're just told to sit quiet. You might as well just go in the corner and twiddle your thumbs.

47:32There's nothing I'm allowed to do. It's horrible. Yeah, I guess the only way to describe it would be like, I can't even describe it. I don't know. Do you still feel like the nervousness of as if you were about to compete before the race? So you still feel nervous? you wake up yeah i'm like jumping on the start line as if i'm about to get in that water like i have the nervous energy i can't i don't feel like eating i don't really want to talk to anyone i'm kind of in the zone as if i'm about to do it and you normally lose a lot of weight on race weeks yeah i don't have an appetite i love that because that just shows how invested you are and i think that marks kind of like a good someone a good coach because the people that aren't invested I don't feel that.

48:16Yes, it's emotion. It's not just like, obviously, it's high a lot with Lucy, but I have other athletes as well. When they're racing, I'm like, I feel like it's me doing it. I guess that's probably leads to why I stopped competing myself because I get everything I got from competing while working with the athletes that I'm working with. I don't, people sometimes, because I stopped my career quite abruptly. I got to the point where I always wanted to get to and then I literally just kind of stopped. But that was because your career took off so quickly. And then people have asked me over the years, like, why did you stop?

48:53And I think the answer is because I'm still almost in my competing satisfaction by being doing it with you and the athletes that I coach. I still get everything from it by doing that. So, yeah, I think it's you're so invested as a coach. You really are. and over an Ironman it's I much prefer a 50 meter sprint in the pool because it's over in 20 seconds it's an eight hour thing something will happen there's always going to be mistakes made or I'll do something wrong like I might drop a bottle of nutrition and then Reece's phone will blow up from all our family and people and going what's this going to mean is this going to what's going to happen and he's like it should be okay like she's got plan b but I don't know I can't speak to her in this moment so I don't know if she's okay so it's it's pretty brutal I said to you in um when you race Marbella I said at some point on the run can you just give me a thumbs up and like tell me you're good because normally I just get like a like oh I'm giving you a bit of information you're locked in you're kind of like like you say you're going to war yeah and then you gave me that you said something to me made me laugh and in Marbella I was like oh good I can I can get to the finish line just enjoy it yeah she's great yeah I love that uh speaking on health obviously we just touched on it how important it is um you went through a bit of a process where training wasn't going as well as you thought and you realized that you went and got some health checks and it took quite a long time to realize but uh you're intolerant to gluten yes so it was 2024 um it was actually quite funny i i had been doing a lot of really hard training and i was like i'm not seeing the usual trajectory of fitness and progress and i'd had had so many injuries like a string of injury I'd get rid of one and then I'd get the next one and I was like no other athlete is having is experiencing this and I'm not training like crazy compared to anyone else I really do prioritize my health and I actually I think I'd raced in Singapore and I'd done okay I wasn't over the moon with the performance and then I traveled to Germany to see two of my sponsors and we ate beer and well we drank beer we had pizza and I came home from there and I was like I'm so unwell that I need to go and get this checked so I went to the doctors did a blood test and they were like you do know you've got celiac disease and I was like no I've made this 30 years old and I did not know this um and they were like well it means you can't eat gluten because it's an autoimmune immune disease if you eat gluten you're just damaging your gut and you won't be able to absorb any of the nutrition that you're eating so ah that would probably explain a lot of my symptoms a lot of why I'm getting injured and did that come on like abruptly or do you feel like you was gluten intolerant your whole life or do you think it because people can pick up intolerances am I right yes so celiac you you will always so you will be born with it you'll have the gene for it and I think I always did have it but it just got progressively worse to the point where it was like alarm bells that something is wrong with my health um when I was younger competing I always had weird symptoms like really bad joint pain after I competed or trained hard and then I still would get that in triathlon and then obviously in triathlon the training volume goes up it running's an impact sport whereas swimming wasn't so I was less at risk of getting injured in swimming but with running you just cannot get away with it so that was why I would get stress fractures and muscle tears and all these things because my body just wasn't able to cope with the demands of training because although I thought I ate really really well my body didn't absorb any of that nutrition so it's quite scary really to think that actually I had been eating it my whole life pretty much poisoning myself from gluten but I feel so much healthier now that I've got on top of it the difference is night and day in terms of my recovery being so much better okay I recently had a surgery but that was kind of different that wasn't really like the injuries I've experienced before so I definitely feel like it was amazing to get the diagnosis I think a lot of people when they find out they've got it like really devastated but I was like actually this is the best thing because now I can actually manage my health a lot better yeah I think your career from 2021 actually just by sort of chance we decided to cut gluten out of your diet and we was really strict with it and you had some of your best ever performances probably one of your best performances as ever was when you won the world title in 2021 and we'd been gluten-free completely before then so hindsight you know we do all this testing but something as glaringly obvious as celiac we didn't pick up on or none of our team picked up on um i wish that we'd stuck to that diet after 2021 but you know almost immediately we came home you'd won a world title there wasn't really anything going on after that because it was sort of post-covid era yeah we went straight back into Lucy eating pizza and pasta and everything pastries and cakes and probably six months later you had your really bad hip stress fracture so you'd gone from winning the world title being amazing to reintroducing gluten into your diet and fragile um and then from 2022 and 23 it was just injury after injury after injury um I think you definitely became your symptoms got worse as you got older which they say does happen um and you became it got to the point where training just wasn't working anymore like you'd cut your volume in half and still get injured um and people were saying because you lost a lot of weight your weight had fluctuated a lot gone up and then down people were saying you're you're getting injured because you were trying to be too skinny um so you was getting like body shamed as well by certain people and it was just so difficult because we were scratching our heads going what is wrong like there's something not adding up like we've got the best team in the world prescribing your training being monitored by you know red bull doctors everything and we can't get to the bottom of why you just can't string together literally two months of training without getting an injury and quite severe injuries as well um so finally getting that diagnosis was a massive relief because it was like we're not going mental we're not doing everything wrong there's been something wrong this whole time i just wish that we'd done it and picked it up sooner it's really cool that you've come out publicly with it though because so many people would be suffering with the exact same and would just put it down to oh i i just can't train that much or uh but i'd urge everyone just to go get an intolerance test because at the end of the day stress is stress on your body if you're eating something that doesn't agree with you your body's going to be stressed out and that's going to be the same as going running 10 extra miles or something like that like it can almost seem like you're overtraining without overtraining so if you can limit stress in in your life which i feel like you guys have kind of maximized uh through diet as well i think uh it can definitely allow you to train a little bit more i feel like with nutrition so obviously now let's say no gluten in your diet what's a typical day looking like are you seeing food as fuel are you trying to make it as nice as possible like how is it looking still big foodie yeah we love food which obviously is a challenge because we like we like eating out but we have to just be a bit more careful where we eat out um i think just being organized i think that's the main thing as an athlete um trying to be practical with food but trying to still get the enjoyment i mean eating a high protein diet because we're obviously ripping our muscles all the time but you need a high carb diet for the amount of training that we're doing obviously i can't now eat pasta or pizza but i can replace that with rice sweet potatoes potato and actually i think they're cleaner better sources of carbohydrate anyway than pasta so actually yeah my diet is probably just way cleaner way healthier anyway yeah so yeah i think the only thing that's been difficult to travel like airports and going to a different place do you try and prep before going on a long haul flight yeah we do um and we always like try and source out so like i'll fly everywhere with a rice cooker and an egg cooker in my suitcase so that at the very least we can get to a location and i can make rice and eggs um when we went to singapore i had a contact there who got us a microwave so they brought that to the hotel that so i could microwave you some rice um always try and make contact with some local people who know where all the gluten-free stuff is it's a lot of forward planning um which is not always easy to do that's what you're there that's what i'm there for yeah fly around with an egg cooker but yeah it's uh it's been a learning curve and we still make mistakes like there's there's still days where you've been accidentally glutinated we found out actually recently your dad made a lovely roast dinner i think it was and it was at himalayan salt or something it had like may contain wheat oh yeah just on the rock salt just on rock salt and yeah yeah you you'd had symptoms and we'd like gone through every single herb and everything in the in the spice cupboard and there it was salt may contain may contain wheat yeah that's crazy yeah you have to be very careful yeah oh interesting and with uh one thing that i've tried to do when traveling is i try and book airbnb's instead of hotels do you kind of do the same do you try and obviously you spend a lot of time traveling do you try and make it like a home away from home yeah so this i quite like this i think this is like um strategy uh i used to play strategy games when i was a kid i think that's what's made you such a good coach and like i love this yeah i'm so nerdy exactly exactly it's like um like football manager like i like to look out and scout the location and i always like i kind to see it as like a competitive advantage if you're staying in a location that's slightly better than your competitors then you know it's it's a small advantage um i love doing that stuff yeah i'll literally i'll look at the contour lines of what altitude it is i'll look at how how long the commute is to the swimming pool how long it is to get to the venue what's the local food like everything i'll try and do everything supermarket it's got a lot easier with ai now you can feed it all into chat gpt and say pick the best location find me my airbnb yeah i like that and obviously you guys are based in london i've not really seen any other pro triathletes that there is live in a city they all leave a like the americans love altitude they live at altitude obviously they've got more access we've literally not got access to altitude here um i feel like the english and europeans like to do camps more and uh how do you find just kind of like your your routine being in london do you find it is an advantage to you it's an acquired taste um i'd say it's taken us 10 years to make the setup perfect for us find the right contacts get everything dialed yeah how long did it take you to get a swimming lane oh my gosh yeah and i don't want to obviously slag anyone off for anything but uh um yeah if we've molded london environment to work if you as an athlete coming to london thinking oh lucy changed trains it must be great don't it won't work unless you're going to stay with us yeah it literally took us like five years of back and forward communication with our local swimming pool to finally let them get give us a lane which we're extremely grateful for thank you but yeah it's it's it's really hard in this country actually like and and unless you've got a world title or something nothing will be given to you like so if you're an up-and-coming athlete it can be really challenging to get the access you need to then become a world champion unless you're part of clubs or things like that to do it on your own is almost impossible um it's only really when you won a world title that then it's like oh yeah now you can have this it's like okay well I really needed it before I mean I still need it now but I really needed it before when I was trying to win the world title but thank you I'll have it now that's great um but yeah it's it's a challenging place to succeed what advice would you give to people that you know growing up in a city they want to take on um any of the sports any endurance sport like what pieces of advice would you give I think the main thing is you learn that you you if you give back something good will come of it at some point there's been loads of occasions where we've you know volunteered our time to the local swimming pool or club and you know a year down the line someone's like oh yeah you're the guys that came to the club we'll help you out um i think you have to scratch someone's back and they'll scratch yours is the saying it's not easy in an urban environment to be an athlete but there's more people who can open more doors so if you play it right it can be advantageous yeah and i think because we live in a busy area i do a lot of my training indoors so i ride on zwift on the turbo i run on the treadmill i obviously do the gym as well and you actually get more done because you have to be more efficient so like when i actually did win the world title in kona i did six weeks of training in london to win and i did it all indoors pretty much like i'd say 90 of my training was just indoors and that was great because I had to do the heat training but I was just super efficient so I maximized my training time and then my recovery time mentally it was brutal like I don't think I'd want to do it again but it did pay off um it allowed me to get all the training I needed to do but we kind of told our friends and family I'm here but I'm not here I'm like on training camp at home so please like don't invite me to anything because it will be a no like the venue is at my parents house and they would come into the training gym and be like I know you're not really here but can I just ask you a question you can talk to us you're allowed to talk to us but I think the um the the flip side of that is escaping from training is so much easier that is true like when you're out in a mountain and you're having a bad day training it's very hard to forget that you're there on training camp whereas here you can just go you know if you really want to go for a dog walk you go cinema you can go for a nice meal you can just take your head off of it and tomorrow's a new day and i think that it's something we do really well probably because we live in london we can very easily tap up our friends and say oh you know we had a really terrible day can we go and do something and nine times out of ten you wake up the next morning feeling refreshed and ready to go again no i love that and i feel like that just gives you a little bit balance as well yeah with your life um as much balance as you can can have when you're 26 hours a day and then recovering for the extra three it also keeps you grounded because it does like no one cares who you are like no one cares you're lucy charles trying to win ironman world championships you're also just someone in the way of the london morning commute so it keeps you like in reality you're not thinking that you're on a pedestal on a pedestal yeah you still you still get beeped at if you cut someone up in the car or uh you still get still sit someone moaning at you if you get too close to them running on the street like it's just it's just grounding yeah i love that um i'm just curious uh sorry i'm just i just know that we're running over a little bit but i just wanted to ask about battle braids and when did this come about and kind of how what does it mean to you yeah so battle braids I mean from the first Ironman we ever did I was like oh I'm gonna get my hair in French braids because it's gonna take me I don't know I was like I knew I had 17 hours to finish I want my hair out the way for the day and I just want to focus on what I'm doing and then I performed pretty well in that race so it became like the pre-race ritual of that oh I'm gonna get my braids in and it's like I get focused and I'm like going into battle for the race and yeah it kind of just grew and grew and then I'd started sharing it on my social media and then I'd have young girls be like oh I've got my battle braids in for my first sports day or they're going to their first district sports or I even had a nurse once who was like I've got this really big exam like I'm braiding my hair for it so it kind of just spread and it's grown really organically and I think it's just about inspiring more women to do hard things doesn't have to be a triathlon it might be like they want to do a park run but just like put your braids in and yeah push yourself see what you can achieve and yeah it's been a really nice movement for inspiring women and girls to do hard things that's that's so cool you get you get like uh people sending you messages like kids doing their first triathlon or i even get like dads like can you send me a tutorial of how to braid hair because my little girl wants her hair braided i'm like okay i'll get around to doing that on youtube but yeah really really you can just imagine them doing it before an event of sports day or anything like that you actually like just from very like taking this to the nerdy side of things when lucy does her braids that's when it's like actually switching to game mode like her whole leave me alone leave me alone like don't want any more media don't want any more cameras i'm not speaking to anyone else once those braids go in it's like oh it's race day like yeah so it's kind of like your psych up mode yeah and everyone probably knows that okay step back let her go you're going to what i love it i love it i want to finish with some quick fire questions um what's the hardest session you've ever done oh do you think running i still think 3100s fly oh yeah but i wouldn't do that anymore no i mean i guess like on each discipline so on swimming we do like 15 100s max that's pretty disgusting yeah or if we do like a really hard threshold set with not much rest um cycling it's when you do like the long ride but you've got to hit those threshold efforts in it so it could be like five hour ride but it's got so many like 20 or 30 minute threshold efforts in it and then running i think like if we do a long run with free 5k threshold efforts in it yeah 35 anything that's got some threshold or above is pretty disgusting there's loads it's too many yeah it's endless all of them that wasn't a short answer was it no i love that next one who does the washing oh that's my department okay yeah I don't even let him touch it.

1:07:19I do try. He does and I get more annoyed that he's done it because he'll put towels in with sports staff or ducks in with whites. I'm like, this is my department. Let me, this is my area. Don't even get involved. Which I'm fine with. What's the most bang for your buck thing that you'd do for performance? You think sleep? Sleep. Yeah, probably good sleep. Yeah. Bank your training and get ready for the next one. I love that. one thing amateurs overcomplicate we're not most amateurs i know do everything hard yeah they just don't do the easy miles so everything i know they're time i know they are time constraints so they want to get the most out of it but there's a place for just doing that the easy steady stuff it doesn't all have to be really hard i think that just leads to injury yeah how many hard days do you have a week obviously everything's hard when you do six hours of training a day or whatever but like if do you split it up into hard days easy days or yeah i think when i'm like in a big block it's like two hard days an easier day two hard days an easier day and then that obviously that doesn't fit into a week but you just follow that cycle and it's like sometimes naturally happens like you might wake up knackered do you ever take a rest day i have to be like dead like i think there was a day in lanzarossi i started a swim session and recently i just get out take the day off and i didn't feel great and then the next day i knew i had a big session and then i was able to hit it so yeah it's just but you sometimes feel worse from a complete day sometimes it might just be literally a 30 minute zone one swim yeah it's not technically a day off but it is a day off yeah if you couldn't do triathlon what would you do oh i think high rocks would be cool i would i definitely want to do a high rocks i see it in my future i think we could do doubles that i think you're good at i watched the video that you did with lucy proxler oh yeah that was so fun that was dangerous actually because it was so fun i was like i could just do this now because it's way more fun than my training um but oh i love um cross country running so like fell running but i'd probably get injured and i also wish i could be a surfer because it's so cool but and if you're watching the winter olympics some of those that was insane yeah i feel like curling the whole nation got behind the winter Olympics this time I feel like yeah um if we could take sport out of it what would you do is like your profession I'd be a professional dog walker I think I love dogs yeah I think I'd be a PT yeah but that's still sport yeah I don't know never never ventured that side of the fence come on anything any hobbies any interests you'd probably be like a gamer gamer yeah a strategy gamer um i think i'd be some sort of manual labory kind of using my hands uh carpenter or something like that i don't think i couldn't sit still i couldn't do an office job i don't think i'd be yeah something active have to be active i love this uh and then after triathlon is there anything that you guys want to pursue yeah we'd we're uh watch this space we're we're setting up a i suppose we could call it an academy where we want to inspire the next generation of lucy's to come through not just lucy's could be anyone but reese's reese's um yeah so we're we're in the process now of setting up an academy uh so it'll be a triathlon club with a very dedicated focus on kids who want to do triathlon and then the niche ones who really want to pursue that as their career um so yeah probably something in that space no that's cool it's cool that you're giving back thank you guys thank you thank you that was really fun no i appreciate it