Faster with Dr Hutch

Alistair Brownlee, Louis Passfield, Josie Perry.

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Episode notes

This time, I’m talking to triathlon legend, Alistair Brownlee. Alistair is a two-time Olympic champion, a two-time World champion and has dominated his sport for more than a decade.

He’s also a man with a sports science degree, and who is still more engaged in the current scientific research than most coaches. That means, from the perspective of Faster, that he can not only perform at the highest levels, he can talk about what that takes and how to keep looking for ways to improve.

We talk about motivation, and how he (and others) can find the drive to keep working through 35 or 40-hour training weeks, even when the next major competition may be months or years away. We’re joined by psychologist (and triathlete) Josie Perry to look at just what you have to do to build that sort of dedication, and how the daily stresses of normal life can derail even the most committed athletes.

We look at the long hours of work that all endurance disciplines demand, and I ask physiologist Louis Passfield about what effect they have and why they’re necessary. Louis also tells me about a six-hour-a-week training protocol that produced the fastest, most consistent improvements in fitness ever recorded in the scientific literature, but which was so deeply unpleasant that almost none of the test subjects was prepared to keep doing it after the study finished.

And Alistair and I talk about his plans to attempt a sub-seven-hour Ironman – that’s around 40 minutes faster than the current world record – by amending one or two of the normal racing regulations.

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