The Long Game: My Journey to Founding Sense Endurance
01 | Starting From Zero
The decision that led eventually to Sense Endurance Coaching was made in a changing room after a Tae-Kwon-Do competition when I was eighteen. I had been fighting competitively for years, held a black belt, won multiple national titles, and finished second at the European Championships. I was on the shortlist for the national team and training thirty hours a week. By any external measure the project was going well.
What I felt, though, was that I had stopped learning. The movements that had once required full concentration had become automatic. The tactical problems that had once absorbed me completely were now familiar. I was good at the sport in a way that had started to feel like a ceiling rather than a platform.
I remember the specific thought: I want to do something I am bad at.
That something turned out to be triathlon. My first pool session produced times I am not going to publish here. My running mechanics, developed entirely through a striking sport, were not built for distance. The fitness I had was largely irrelevant to the new demands. I went from being the person in the room with the most experience to being the person making the most obvious errors, and I found that I enjoyed it in a way I had stopped enjoying Tae-Kwon-Do. The discomfort of genuine incompetence turned out to be what I had been missing. It is the same thing I ask of athletes now, and I think it is easier to ask when you know what it actually feels like.
02 | The Decade in Between
For the next decade I coached part-time and raced triathlon while working as a legal translator specialising in tax matters. The translation work required a precision with language that I still apply to coaching. The habit of checking whether the words being used actually mean what they are supposed to mean, and whether the instruction being given produces the response it was intended to produce.
During that period I accumulated certifications — ITCA, 80/20 Endurance, and eventually Trisutto — and I raced every distance from sprint to full-distance. The combination of coaching other athletes and competing myself for fifteen years produced a set of observations that did not always align with the conventional coaching advice available at the time.
The observations that kept recurring: athletes who trained a great deal were often not improving. Swimmers who drilled endlessly were not swimming better in races than they did in the pool. Cyclists who chased high cadence on structured plans were arriving at T2 more compromised than their power data suggested they should be. Runners who logged high volume at easy pace were fading in the back half of races in ways that fitness should have prevented. Something in the standard approach was producing a systematic gap between training performance and race performance, and the gap was consistently in the same direction.
03 | What Working with Brett Sutton Clarified
The Trisutto Coach the Coach programme, and the season I spent working closely with Brett Sutton, gave me a framework for what I had been observing. Sutton has coached Daniela Ryf, Nicola Spirig, and Chrissie Wellington to world championships and Olympic medals across four decades. His position on most of the questions I had been turning over was direct and unbothered by convention.
The specific things that changed in my coaching are written up in detail elsewhere. The short version: the swim training that works is high-repetition paddle volume that trains the stroke under accumulated fatigue, not drill sequences that train it when fresh. The cycling that works for athletes without a cycling background is low-cadence strength work, not high-cadence spinning. The intensity ceiling of 95% of maximum effort produces more total quality training across a block than sessions that regularly exceed it. And the instruction he gives athletes before sessions — you start, you finish — is a more useful coaching principle than anything that depends on conditions cooperating.
What Sutton confirmed was that the gap I had been observing between training performance and race performance was largely a preparation gap. Athletes were training fitness they already had rather than the specific capacities the race would demand. The correction was not complicated. It required stripping away the sessions that were producing no specific adaptation and replacing them with sessions designed for the actual demands of triathlon.
04 | What Sense Endurance Is
I founded Sense Endurance in 2024, having spent fifteen years as a part-time coach and a decade as a competitive athlete. The name carries the thing I think is most missing from how most age-group triathletes train: the ability to sense effort accurately, to read what the body is doing without deferring to a screen, and to make good decisions under fatigue on race day.
The athletes I work with are time-crunched. Most of them have jobs, families, and training windows that are fixed by the demands of real life rather than by what an optimal programme would specify. The coaching philosophy is built around what that constraint actually requires: sessions that produce specific adaptation efficiently, strength built within the disciplines rather than alongside them, and a pacing sense developed through training rather than through data dependency.
The article on Ironman training covers the practical application for long-course athletes specifically. The piece on why triathletes overcomplicate their training addresses the broader pattern I see in almost every athlete who arrives with a history of self-coaching or poorly designed plans.
The coaching is not complicated to describe. Train what the race demands. Build strength within each discipline specifically. Keep intensity below the point where recovery becomes the limiting factor. Develop the pacing sense that lets an athlete read what is available on a given day and work accurately within it. Finish what you start.
These are not novel ideas. They are principles that the most effective coaching in the sport has operated on for decades. What I offer is the application of those principles to the specific constraints of the age-group athlete who is training ten hours a week around a life that will not pause for the training block.
If the approach described here sounds like what your training has been missing, Sense Endurance Coaching is where it is applied in practice, built around your race calendar, your available hours, and the specific gaps your training history reveals.
If you want the structure without the one-on-one coaching relationship, the Sense Endurance training plans are built on the same principles: purposeful sessions, discipline-specific strength, and nothing that does not earn its place in a time-crunched week.