In this episode I chat with triathlete Dave Halpin, who just got back from South Africa where he was repping Australia in the Ironman 70.3 world champs. Dave is also an exercise physiologist who knows his stuff back to front.

What I found super interesting in this chat was the discussion we had about the role of cross training in endurance sports. We all know about the benefits of cross training physically, and it’s not much of a surprise that mentally it keeps things interesting as well (variety is the spice of life) but the thing I found interesting was the way Dave talked about it like a conductor would talk about pulling together an orchestra during a performance. The better we get at understanding all the components in our body, the better we are at orchestrating them to work together optimally.

It seemed to me that Dave draws much of his motivation from the challenge inherent in this aspect of the training and racing. On reflection on my own training I realise that I see too much of a 1:1 correlation between time out running and race day performance. Once upon a time that used to get me excited as it was a fairly simple pathway to follow to try and find my limits, but now that I hit pretty much that limit, I’ve lost that motivation. The thing I now realise was it wasn’t really my limit (as I did very little cross training) and the extrinsic motivation was destined to dry up eventually (as Dave also talks about in this episode).

The mindset Dave has holds much more intrinsic motivation, and it clearly serves him well.

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