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Triathlon coaches have helped many senior triathletes navigate their triathlon journey. This is true for first timers, competitive master triathletes with decades of experience, and those in between.

After rejoining Lifetime Fitness during our visit to Minnesota this summer, I sat down with Cheryl Zitur, personal trainer and senior triathlete, to get her thoughts on several triathlon training-related questions, most of which have come from members of our community over the past months.

About Cheryl Zitur

Before I dive into sharing Cheryl’s thoughts on how a triathlon coach can help you along your triathlon journey, let me tell you a bit about her.

Cheryl came to triathlon with a background in competitive swimming during high school and college. At age 41, she trained for and completed her first sprint triathlon, the Buffalo Triathlon (Buffalo, Minnesota).

This first triathlon reignited the competitive spirit from her swimming days. After a couple of years competing in triathlon, Cheryl began exploring ways of training that would improve her performance and make her more competitive. Within two years, Cheryl experienced her first age group win.

It was time for a new goal, one that eventually led to her winning her first triathlon at age 49.

With a more effective approach to training, Cheryl was on a roll. She went on to win 18 more triathlons as a senior triathlete.

Along the way, Cheryl started training for longer distance triathlons, including Olympic, IRONMAN 70.3, and IRONMAN. It was at the beginning of this part of her triathlon journey that Cheryl first hired a coach to help her train for the longer distance races.

In 2013, Cheryl left her career in accounting to become a personal trainer, triathlon coach, and, more recently, coach of the Masters swim group at Lifetime Fitness in Maple Grove, Minnesota.

Today, Cheryl is a Certified Personal Trainer (CPT), Corrective Exercise Specialist (CES), and Performance Enhancement Specialist (PES) with certifications from NASM (National Academy of Sports Medicine). She is also a Level 1 USAT Triathlon coach and IRONMAN Certified Coach.

During the summer, Cheryl also runs an 8-week kids triathlon club for girls and boys ages 8 to 14. The goal of the club is to introduce young people to the sport of triathlon.

Navigating Life While Continuing With Triathlon

Many triathlons double as fundraisers for causes that help others, young and old, locally and across the world. Cheryl has demonstrated this spirit while continuing her triathlon journey.

In 2016, a year before completing her first IRONMAN triathlon, Cheryl donated one of her kidneys to her oldest son. While being a lifesaver for her son, donating her kidney has not hindered her performance or ability to remain active in triathlon.

Cheryl encourages others – triathletes and everyone else – to consider being a living donor and to check the donor box when the opportunity presents itself.

Triathlon As A Journey

Some seniors complete a triathlon, check this off their bucket list, and move on to the next item.

However, it is far more common that the first-time triathlete becomes ‘hooked’ on the sport. Triathlon is just the motivation needed for them to train consistently and maintain a healthy lifestyle, so they continue to compete.

Many who continue with triathlon do so with new goals. These include getting faster and going longer distances.

What I heard from Cheryl, who has been on her own triathlon journey as well as helped others on theirs, is that a coach can help triathletes at the various stages along the way.

I love helping people get to the finish line.

Cheryl Zitur

Coaching for First Time Triathletes

If you can swim, bike, and run, you are starting your triathlon journey from a good place. But you are not there yet. Triathlon is more than swimming, biking, and running as individual sports.

If you doubt this, go for a 45 minute fast paced bike ride. Then, immediately after getting off the bike, go for a 3-mile run.

How do you feel? A little wierd?

A triathlon coach will help you learn to run after the bike leg.

A coach will also help the first-timer prepare for the inevitable chaos that every triathlete faces during an open water swim start. He/she will also help the new triathlete plan the swim-to-bike and bike-to-run transitions.

A triathlon coach will show beginners how to put together the various pieces of a triathlon and complete distances in each sport back-to-back at a pace matching their level of fitness.

Helping You Become More Confident

Chances are you have one leg of the triathlon in which you are weaker than the other two.

From your questions, swimming is that leg for many of you. This is especially true when the swim is in open water. This is also Cheryl’s experience with the beginner triathletes she coaches.

Having come from a background of competitive swimming, Cheryl leads a Masters swim class in which new swimmers and swimmers who lack confidence can pick up the basic skills for swimming. Along the way, they become more confident.

She also leads a group, many of these triathletes, who head out into the open water once each week. By swimming in various conditions, triathletes gain the confidence to tackle the swim leg no matter the conditions.

Cheryl also advises her students to use a wetsuit, that is, if the water temperature is within a range where USAT rules allow use of a wetsuit. A wetsuit will cover a multitude of swimming ‘sins’ by keeping the body and legs high in the water.

While a coach cannot guarantee your confidence, they will help you be more prepared for the unknowns.

Coaching For a Longer Distance Triathlon

Many triathletes progress to compete in longer distance races. You can find many such stories on this site.

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A progression from sprint to Olympic to half or full IRONMAN is common, even among those in their 60s, 70s, and beyond. Cheryl appreciates the differences between training for and racing in the varying distances, having completed all of them, from sprint to IRONMAN.

What seems to be a small step in going from the sprint to the Olympic distance, especially when you consider IRONMAN distances, turns out to not be so small.

Nutrition is huge for any race over two and a half hours long.

Cheryl Zitur, Lifetime Fitness

For sprint distance triathlons, the winning approach involves going more or less all out (Zone 4 in a triathlon coach’s language) for the entire race. However, each longer distance brings additional considerations.

For example, compared to the sprint distance, the Olympic distance triathlon introduces another dimension to the training and race plan – nutrition consumed during the race. And longer distances each bring new challenges. For example, training for a full IRONMAN triathlon often requires 12 to 14 hours per week during the last months.

A coach with the education and personal experience of training for and racing in the various distances seems essential, especially for the IRONMAN races.

Coaching for Better Performance With Age

Once you have witnessed the awards ceremony at a triathlon and decided to continue competing, you will probably want to be faster.

It’s possible. Some triathletes deliver their best performance later in their triathlon careers. They are faster now than they were ten years ago.

So, you want to be on the podium some day. How do you get there?

There are a lot of books on triathlon training you can read. The internet is full of material as well. However, many seniors realize that most of the literature in print or on the internet assumes a younger triathlete, at least someone 40 years or younger.

But the needs of our community differ significantly from the younger triathletes.

According to Cheryl, the most important difference between coaching a 30-year-old triathlete and a 60 to 70-year-old triathlete is the need for recovery. Older athletes are more prone to injury and therefore require more time for recovery between hard training sessions.

As noted in Rest and Recovery: Why It’s Important for Senior Triathletes, recovery does not mean retiring to the sofa. Cheryl prescribes active recovery, including yoga and other forms of stretching that develop core strength and balance.

Smarter Training for Senior Triathletes

Balancing training and recovery is part of what Cheryl calls ‘smart training’. This is her focus with all the endurance athletes she coaches.

The training often begins with a treadmill test to measure an individual’s heart rate versus running pace. From this, she will define the person’s four heart rate zones, which are used as the basis for an individual’s specific training plan.

The training plan she prepares will include the right mix of training within the various heart rate zones. A typical schedule will include about 80% of the training time in heart rate zones 1 and 2 for building aerobic base fitness and one workout per week in each of zones 3 and 4 for cardiovascular fitness.

The training schedule will also include strength training (an important element of training that is often the first to be cut by most triathletes), active recovery, and rest.

Finally, a triathlon coach will also help with specific issues, such as bike handling or the swim stroke, based on the triathlete’s needs.

Conclusion

Reflecting on my conversation with Cheryl Zitur, I wondered if, by remaining self-coached, I have missed an opportunity to become a stronger competitor.

A triathlon coach can help the beginner triathlete prepare and complete their first triathlon. Beyond this, a coach can guide the triathlete to new goals, whether it is to longer distance races, higher performance and competitiveness, or both.

Do You Use A Triathlon Coach? Why?

What are your thoughts about hiring a triathlon coach? Or maybe a coach for one of the legs, for example swimming? Share your thoughts and questions in the Comments below.

We know that recovery is critical for older triathletes. If heart rate variability can measure how well we have recovered, can it also help senior triathletes recover more completely?

My First Experience With Heart Rate Variability

Joy and I started using a new Sleep Number bed recently. While reviewing our sleep scores from the Sleep IQ app, it surprised me to see Heart Rate Variability, or HRV for short, as a metric for sleep quality.

I had previously come across articles about HRV in relation to triathlon training. However, I had paid little attention since there seemed to be a fair amount of controversy about HRV measurement and its usefulness for training.

In this post, I share what I have learned about the current state of heart rate variability for triathlon training and how it may be useful for senior triathletes.

What Is Heart Rate Variability (HRV)?

According to Sleep Number’s Sleep IQ app, “Heart rate variability (HRV) is the measure of different time durations between each heartbeat.”

For example, a heart rate of 60 beats per minute suggests that the heart beats an average of once each second. However, the actual time between beats varies, sometimes more and sometimes less, around the average time.

The variation between heartbeats comes from our autonomic nervous system’s (ANS) effort to fine tune our bodily functions in response to various sources of stress.

The ANS helps us maintain balance through its two branches:

• sympathetic nervous system (SNS) which manages our ‘fight or flight’ stress response needed for short-term survival.
• parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS), which handles our ‘rest and digest’ responses required for long-term survival.

The commonly reported value for HRV is the standard deviation of the variations in the time between heartbeats. Another name for this is the standard deviation of normal-to-normal inter-beat intervals (SDNN) measured in milliseconds. (Don’t worry if your memory of statistics is rusty.)

What Can Senior Triathletes Learn From Heart Rate Variability?

The SleepIQ app adds, “A high HRV is good. High HRV means high energy, good recovery, enhanced cognitive performance, and balance of heart and mind. Monitor stress and well-being by monitoring your heart rate variability.”

Under most conditions, high HRV shows that your body can adapt to many types of changes. Conversely, lower HRV suggests a less flexible body, one currently experiencing or on the verge of health problems.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, low HRV is “also more common in people who have higher resting heart rates. That’s because when your heart is beating faster, there’s less time between beats, reducing the opportunity for variability.”

However, there are some exceptions, which complicate use of this metric. High HRV can also occur when the stress from training has exceeded our ability to recover, at the onset of illness, and because of changes in sleep and exercise patterns.

Can We Influence Our HRV?

If a high HRV is generally better, what can we do to increase it?

As illustrated in the table below, there are many factors that affect HRV. Some, like diet and exercise, we can control. Others, such as age and gender, we cannot.

Getting good sleep, eating a heart-healthy diet, avoiding unhealthy environments whenever possible, and training at a level appropriate for our level of fitness are actions we can take to increase our HRV.

In addition, alternative medicine approaches, including biofeedback training, may be helpful. Biofeedback is a method mentioned by Cleveland Clinic for improving heart rate variability for those who suffer from stress, emotional disorders, physical issues such as hypertension, and addictions.

Related post: 11 Passages to Read to Help Fight Worry

The numerous factors affecting HRV explain why it is best to track HRV during sleep, that is when many of the factors will not affect the measurement. If manual measurement is required, then measure HRV immediately upon waking.

HRV For Triathlon Training

HRV is already recognized as a tool for assessing the risk of sudden cardiac death. Meanwhile, measurement of HRV for applications like endurance training is still emerging, albeit quickly.

For example, in the past few years, HRV measurement has advanced from requiring ECG sensors to using a cell phone camera. Its use has expanded to include guiding day-to-day triathlon training.

Earlier Research Demonstrated the Potential for HRV as a Training Metric

In principle, because HRV measures the effects of mental and physical stress, it should be an indicator of training stress.

A 2016 report titled “Detailed heart rate variability analysis in athletes” documented the higher HRV for elite and masters triathletes compared to “healthy, but not athletic” adults. The author’s conclusions included: “Further investigations are needed to determine its [HRV’s] role in risk stratification, optimization of training, or identifying overtraining”.

In another 2016 report titled “The role of heart rate variability in sports physiology“, the author noted that studies in which HRV was used to monitor exercise training “suggested that monitoring indices of HRV may be useful for tracking the time course of training adaptation/maladaptation in order to set optimal training loads that lead to improved performances”. In other words, HRV could be used to optimize training load and recovery.

Triathlete and triathlon coach Dr. Dan Plews describes himself as “a big proponent of using daily, resting measures of heart rate variability (HRV) to help guide day-to-day training decisions”.

Plews completed his PhD on heart rate variability in 2017. In an interview with Mikael Eriksson on the Scientific Triathlon podcast during the same year, Dr. Plews shared some results of his research.

He stated that our resting HRV, that measured first thing after waking, can tell a lot about how well we have recovered. However, since many factors affect this single measurement, it is better to look at the trend in HRV, typically over seven days.

HRV Measurement for the Amateur Athlete

Over the last five years, HRV has grown from a research topic to a metric used by amateur athletes and fitness enthusiasts to plan their training schedules.

HRV measurement is more accessible. Today, you can measure your HRV with a smart bed, such as Sleep Number. You can also measure HRV with your smartphone or a host of wearable devices, like smart watches and finger rings.

Smartphone apps are also more capable of interpreting and summarizing the measurements.

For example, the following is from a post on the EdureIQ blog. “HRV, which can be measured reliably and with validity using a smartphone application, gives us insight into the functioning of our autonomic nervous system, and trends in our daily, resting HRV give us insight into the balance between stress and recovery; downward trends in HRV, or big daily fluctuations in HRV, tell us that stress and fatigue is accumulating”. 

One word of caution. There is significant disagreement about the accuracy of devices that use light, rather than electrical impulses, to measure heart rate through the skin. It is not clear whether this is based on fact or marketing tactics.

However, the consensus is that the day-to-day trend in HRV is more useful than an isolated HRV measurement, even if made during sleep or immediately after waking.

Some Suppliers of Sensors and Software for HRV

If you are interested in exploring heart rate variability for your training, look at these suppliers of devices and software for measuring and reporting it.

I would also like to hear (in the Comments below) what you learn and/or decide.

Elite HRV

This company supplies a free cell phone app for use with a select list of heart rate chest strap which they have qualified for HRV measurement.

Garmin

Garmin supplies sports watches, including heart rate monitoring devices and apps for measuring and tracking HRV.

HRV4Training

This business provides a paid smartphone app described to provide “Heart Rate Variability (HRV) insights to help you quantify stress, better balance training and lifestyle, and improve performance”.

ithlete

According to the ithlete website, “A convenient one minute daily measurement with ithlete will provide you with all the information you need to tailor your training and recovery ensuring maximum performance.”

Polar

This leader in heart rate measurement offers the Polar Flow app for use with one of their heart rate straps to measure HRV.

Whoop

Whoop uses a wearable device to measure heart rate, heart rate variability, breath rate, and other factors (e.g. skin temperature) to calculate a degree of recovery.

Is Tracking Heart Rate Variability Helpful for Senior Triathletes?

There is growing evidence that heart rate variability is useful for tracking training stress and recovery. Measuring HRV is no longer an issue. However, interpreting the results may still be a challenge because of the many factors that affect day-to-day and even longer trends in HRV.

What do you think about using HRV as a metric for monitoring your triathlon training and recovery?