Top long-distance triathlete Matt Hanson recently completed three full-distance races in the space of five weeks – and he’s been speaking about the big learnings he took out of that gruelling schedule.

The sequence started with fifth place at IRONMAN Cairns in Australia in mid-June, followed by ninth at Challenge Roth in Germany and then 11th at IRONMAN Lake Placid in the USA.

The American is also a coach and his biggest takeout was sparked by what happened to an age-group athlete at Lake Placid.

It’s a long day out

In his latest video, which is embedded below, he explained: “Ironman is a long day. You’re always going to have things that go wrong. Sometimes they’re really little, sometimes they’re really big.

“I remember as we were setting up our bikes in transition before the race in Lake Placid, a lady tripped on one of the barricades, spilled her coffee and was little bit shaken by the whole situation and it happened to be right next to me and I just said ‘hey, you know what if you got the worst thing that’s going to happen to you out of the way already, the rest of the day is going to go great’.

“That, that was the first thing that popped to my head but I’ve really been kind of thinking about it as time’s gone on.

“You saw that with me, I had a terrible bike in Cairns, and I didn’t have a good bike in Challenge Roth either, but I was able to salvage something positive out of those days.

“It wasn’t necessarily what I went to the races for but I was able to stick in the race or get back in the race and in both cases put together a really great run.

“I ran up into fifth at Cairns and I was able to run sub 2:30 at Challenge Roth which was the goal. So both ended up having positive outcomes even though I didn’t necessarily get the result that I wanted.”

Hanging tough

Clearly very few athletes have a sub 2:30 marathon in them – but Hanson’s advice holds true whatever the level.

He added: “I’ve been speaking about that with the athletes that I coach. And I’ve been thinking about how I can talk about that as a coach in the future as well.

“And if you look at both Cairns and Lake Placid, Matthew Marquardt was having really tough times coming out of the water in both of those races [he had cramping issues and virtually came to a standstill].

“But he ended up destroying the bike and running really well in both cases – and ended up winning both of them after a significant amount of adversity.

“It takes a lot of mental toughness to do something like that and that’s something that I’ve always worked on developing throughout my career. It’s a lot easier to do that when your emotional battery is fully charged and I’ve been better at making sure that’s fully charged going into big races.

“But I wasn’t fully charged going into Lake Placid and when things got tough, especially the last Ks of the run, I wasn’t as locked in and laser-focused as I was in the previous two races. And that cost me at least one place, if not two, which in my world was the difference between paying to work and breaking even or making money on the day.”

Hanson’s marathon that day was a 2:41 compared to that stellar 2:28 at Roth and 2:30 in Cairns.