Alanis Siffert Won Roth With Principles You Can Use
01 | A Small Decision in the Middle of a Big Race
Alanis Siffert was somewhere on the Roth bike course, riding at the front of the women's race, when she glanced down and saw a power figure higher than it should have been. She had caught Lucy Charles-Barclay earlier than expected. She felt strong. The number said she was working beyond what the day would allow.
Her response was to switch her Garmin to the navigation page.
That is the whole of it. She did not sit up. She did not recalculate. She rode the rest of the 180 kilometres on what her legs and her breathing were telling her, came into T2 with the fastest bike split of the day at 4:29:19, and then ran 2:45:00 to win Challenge Roth in 8:09:09, seven minutes and thirty-two seconds ahead of Charles-Barclay. At twenty-four she became the youngest winner of the race since Paula Newby-Fraser in 1986.
Charles-Barclay led out of the water and Siffert was third, a minute and forty down. She made her move around thirty kilometres into the ride and spent most of the remaining distance alone at the front, through a second lap that was windy and thick with age-group traffic. Daisy Davies took third and Matthews fourth. The build-up had belonged to the two British favourites, so the headline is the upset.
The conditions deserve a mention, because the Roth bike leg flatters nobody on the second lap. I set out what racing Roth is really like after last year's race. The rolling terrain never lets effort settle, the course is crowded with athletes riding at very different standards, the wind builds through the morning, and, for most agegroupers, Solar Hill is a different place by the time the second pass comes round and the crowds have moved to the finish. Siffert rode the fastest split in the field through all of it, alone, with nobody to work with.
The part I keep returning to is the page switch. It is a small physical action taken under pressure by an athlete who had already decided, long before race day, which source of information she was going to obey. And she is coached by Brett Sutton, which meant that when I read the interview the decision made complete sense to me.
I want to be careful about what I am claiming here. This is not my athlete and not my result. What Roth gave me was the experience of watching a set of principles I have held for a long time get demonstrated at the top of the sport by someone who holds them too.
02 | Five Years From the Pool to the Top Step
Siffert's background matters here, because the way she was built explains the way she raced.
She was born in Fribourg in November 2001 into a sporting family and spent close to a decade as a competitive swimmer, training up to twenty-two hours a week from a young age. Triathlon arrived by accident. When the pandemic closed the pools she turned to mountain biking and running to stay occupied, and found she preferred the combination to the thing she had been doing since childhood.
The meeting that changed her career happened at a training camp in St Moritz. She had just ended her swimming career and wanted to move into triathlon without much idea of how. Brett Sutton was there with his squad preparing for the Tokyo Olympics, saw her swimming, and asked whether she wanted to join the professional group. She joined in September 2021, aged nineteen, and took her first professional win nine months later.
Everything since has been built inside that environment. Twelve professional victories by twenty-four, including Embrunman, two wins at Alpe d'Huez, Challenge Peguera Mallorca and Ironman 70.3 Shanghai. She has never had a coach in the sport other than Sutton.
Two details from her own account turn up directly in how she rode and ran at Roth. The first concerns her position on the bike. She rides in an aggressive aero-climbing position regardless of terrain, including up Alpe d'Huez, and her explanation has nothing to do with aerodynamics. She uses it because it lets her push harder through the pedals. She started doing it in training, found it produced more force, and brought it into racing. That is an athlete selecting a position on the evidence of what her body can generate rather than on a wind tunnel argument.
The second concerns her calendar. She races frequently and does not taper much, training through races and using them as fitness rather than sacrificing the surrounding weeks to them. Roth came after a T100 in Gold Coast, a win at 70.3 Shanghai and a fifth in Spain.
Her 2025 Roth is the last piece of context. She produced the fastest swim in the field, led much of the bike, and was caught and passed by Laura Philipp, finishing third in 8:41:41 with a 3:04:30 marathon. She went back knowing exactly where the race had come apart.
03 | The Things I Kept Noticing Before I Had a Framework For Them
I coached part-time for around fifteen years and raced every distance from sprint to full-distance while working as a legal translator. Across that period the same observations kept arriving, and they did not fit the coaching advice that was widely available.
Swimmers who drilled constantly were not swimming better in races. Their pool sets looked clean and their open water splits did not move. Cyclists chasing high cadence on structured plans arrived at T2 more compromised than their power files suggested they should be. Runners logging large volumes at easy pace faded in the back half of races in a way that their fitness should have prevented.
The pattern was consistent in its direction. There was a gap between what athletes could do in training and what they produced on race day, and it always fell the same way round. I could see the gap clearly but could not yet explain it.
Racing myself over the same period made it harder to ignore. It is one thing to watch an athlete you coach fade in the back half of a marathon and reason about why. It is another to be the one whose legs are still capable of the pace and whose stride has stopped delivering it. I had sessions in training that predicted results I never produced. The training was not dishonest and the fitness was real. Something about the way it had been built refused to show up on the day.
04 | What the Season With Brett Clarified
The Trisutto Coach the Coach programme, and the season I spent working closely with Brett Sutton, gave me the framework I had been missing. Sutton has coached Daniela Ryf, Nicola Spirig and Chrissie Wellington to world titles and Olympic medals across four decades. His answers to the questions I had been circling were direct and completely unbothered by what the wider sport happened to believe that year.
The gap I had been observing was a preparation gap. Athletes were training the fitness they already possessed instead of the specific capacities the race would demand of them. That single reframe explained the swimmers, the cyclists and the runners at once.
Drill sequences train a stroke that works when the athlete is fresh, and races are not swum fresh. High-cadence spinning trains a pedalling pattern that suits athletes who arrived with a cycling background and the strength to support it, which most age-group triathletes did not. Easy-paced volume builds an aerobic base the athlete cannot then access at the effort the race requires, because they have never practised holding form at that effort with fatigue already in the legs.
The correction in each case was to strip out the sessions producing no specific adaptation and replace them with sessions built for what the race asks. Paddle volume that loads the stroke under accumulated fatigue. Low-cadence strength work for athletes without a cycling background. An intensity ceiling around 95% of maximum effort, which produces more total quality across a block than a programme that regularly breaches it.
None of this was new information to me in the sense of being unfamiliar. It was the organising principle underneath things I had already half-seen. That is what a good framework does. It does not replace your experience, but tells you what your experience has been showing you.
The instruction Sutton gives athletes before sessions has stayed with me more than any of the physiology. You start, you finish. Fifteen years of coaching had already taught me that the athletes who improved were the ones who completed what they set out to do, regardless of weather, mood, or whether the first ten minutes felt promising. Hearing it stated that plainly by someone with four decades of results behind it settled the question.
I should be straight about what working with Sutton was like. Sutton is not a warm coach and does not try to be encouraging, and I would not describe the experience as comfortable. What he has is a complete absence of doubt about what he thinks, and spending a sustained period around that does something to a coach. I had arrived slightly embarrassed by my own observations, because they contradicted most of what I had been taught and most of what my athletes were reading online. I left holding them as a method rather than a suspicion. It is the single most useful thing anyone has done for my coaching.
05 | Effort Read From the Inside
At Sense Endurance I use a four-level effort scale with athletes, borrowed directly from Trisutto: Easy, Moderate, Medium, Mad. Easy means genuinely easy, with conversation available and no accumulation of effort across the session. Moderate is a noticeable increase in demand that remains sustainable across long efforts. Medium is clearly uncomfortable and purposeful. Mad is (short) race-effort intensity, reserved for short intentional moments and specific sessions.
The scale maps onto physiological zones without asking the athlete to manage a number. An athlete who trains with feel as the primary guide and data as a check develops an execution skill that transfers to race day. An athlete who cannot assess effort without a screen has outsourced the one judgement that matters most when conditions stop cooperating.
This is a more specific position than a rejection of data, and the distinction matters. In the periodisation work I use a three-block session, twenty minutes at Moderate, twenty at Medium and twenty at Mad, ridden with the screen covered. Afterwards the power file becomes the diagnostic. A well-calibrated athlete produces a staircase, with clearly separated power levels rising block by block. An athlete whose file shows a flat or declining profile despite rising subjective effort has told us something specific and useful about fatigue perception outrunning mechanical output. The data is doing real work there, but after the session rather than during it.
I once ran that session with an athlete who had been self-coaching off power for three years, and the staircase came out backwards. His Mad block produced less power than his Medium block, and he finished convinced he had gone harder than at any point in the previous month. He had. The effort was real and the output was not there, because three years of riding to a number had trained him to produce the number and nothing else. It took most of a winter to rebuild the connection.
Siffert's page switch is the racing version of the covered screen. The number was accurate. It was also, in that moment, information she could do nothing useful with. Obeying it would have meant easing off an effort her body was successfully sustaining, on the evidence of a metric that had already been contradicted by direct physical feedback. She removed the source of the confusion and continued reading the one that was working.
Her own account is that she knew what she risked. She had suffered late on the bike at Roth the previous year, she knew Charles-Barclay and Matthews were behind her, and she went anyway on the grounds that if she blew up she would blow up later next time. That is a calibrated athlete making a decision with information she trusts.
If you want to dig into this, my article on data dependency covers the fuller argument, and the piece on zone 2 obsession deals with the calibration problem underneath it.
06 | The Swim She Arrived With
Siffert's swim is the least discussed part of her race, because nobody expects a former competitive swimmer to be anything other than quick. She came out of the water at Roth a minute and forty behind Charles-Barclay, who is the strongest swimmer in the sport.
The interesting question is why it has stayed quick. Swimming erodes faster than anything else when an athlete stops treating it seriously, and Siffert's bike and run have absorbed almost all of the development attention since 2021. A swim built on technical fragility would have decayed under that neglect.
Hers has not, and the reason is the same reason her bike works. She spent close to a decade accumulating volume in the water at up to twenty-two hours a week, which is a stroke built through repetition under fatigue rather than assembled from components in front of a mirror. That is what a Trisutto swim block tries to manufacture in athletes who did not have that childhood: high-repetition paddle work that loads the stroke while the athlete is already tired, so the pattern that survives is the one the race will use.
This was the first of the three observations I set out earlier, and the one I was most confident about before Brett explained it, because it was the one I could see most clearly. I coached a masters swimmer for two seasons who could produce a technically excellent length on demand. Filmed fresh, her catch was better than mine. Put her in an open water race and she reverted to a short, high, panicked stroke inside four hundred metres. Nothing she had practised was available to her, because she had only ever practised it when nothing was being asked of her.
The correction was paddle volume, longer sets, and putting the technical work at the point in the session where she was already tired.
Siffert is what it looks like when an athlete arrives having done a decade of that by default. She never had to be taught to swim under fatigue. She had never swum any other way.
07 | The Bike That Made the Run Possible
Siffert rode 4:29:19, the fastest split in the women's field, most of it alone at the front into wind and through heavy age-group traffic. She then ran the fastest marathon of the day. A ride that hard normally costs the run. Hers did not, and that is where the race was actually won.
Go back to her explanation of the aero-climbing position. She rides it everywhere, including up Alpe d'Huez, and the reason is that it lets her push harder through the pedals. Not that it cheats the wind. That it lets her generate more force. She found it in training, felt the difference, and brought it to racing.
That is the whole of the Trisutto position on cycling stated by an athlete rather than a coach. The cycling that works for people who did not arrive from a cycling background is low-cadence strength work. Big gear, low revolutions, sustained, with the load going through the legs rather than the lungs. The instinct of most triathletes is the opposite, because high cadence feels efficient and the power number is easier to hold when the effort is spread across cardiovascular capacity instead of muscular capacity.
The problem with spinning your way through a bike leg is that it borrows against the run. An athlete generating their bike split cardiovascularly arrives in T2 with legs that have not been loaded much and a system that has been working hard for four hours. An athlete generating it muscularly arrives with legs that have done real work and a system that still has capacity. The second athlete runs. The first one shuffles and cannot explain why, because the power file says the ride was controlled.
My own racing taught me this before I had the language for it. I had rides that felt beautifully managed and produced marathons I could not run. The data was reassuring right up until T2, at which point it stopped being relevant to anything.
For time-crunched athletes the consequence is useful. Low-cadence strength work requires specific volume rather than large volume. Six hours a week on the bike is enough to build the muscular capacity to hold race effort without the cardiovascular cost, and that capacity largely determines whether an athlete can run off it. Strength built inside the discipline rather than alongside it in a gym.
The page switch on her Garmin was possible because the legs underneath her were telling her something reliable. Neither half of that works without the other.
08 | The Run That Held
The bike bought her the opportunity to run. What she did with it is a separate question, and it is the one that should be making other coaches uncomfortable.
Siffert came to running at eighteen with no running background. Five years later she ran 2:45:00 at Roth, the fastest split in a field of career triathletes, most of whom have been running for years. Her previous best was 2:57:48 at Challenge Almere in 2024, so she took close to thirteen minutes off it inside a full-distance race. Sutton told her afterwards that he had done the maths, considered a ten-minute improvement already a significant ask, and had been stressed watching it.
A gain of that size, from that starting point, in that timeframe, does not come from accumulated mileage. There has not been time for accumulated mileage. It comes from mechanics that survive the specific fatigue of a full-distance race.
This is the part of the framework I lean on hardest, because it translates most directly to limited hours. Time-crunched age-groupers cannot build enormous aerobic volume. They can build a stride that does not fall apart at kilometre thirty. Form also does not collapse all at once, which is what makes it trainable. Cadence goes first, and the stride extends to compensate for the lost leg speed, which puts the foot down further in front of the hip and adds a braking force to every contact. Posture follows, with the hips drifting back and the torso tipping forward from the waist, cutting the hip extension that drives the back of the stride. Arm mechanics deteriorate last, elbows flaring and shoulders climbing toward the ears. By the time an athlete notices the third stage, the economy has already gone.
The useful consequence is that the chain runs backwards as well as forwards. An athlete who catches the cadence drop early and consciously shortens the stride often finds that posture and arms recover without further intervention. That is a race-day skill, and it is trained by putting form work where the fatigue is.
I learned that sequence on myself before I taught it to anyone. My own races came apart in exactly that order, and I spent years treating the symptom I noticed last, the shoulders, because it was the only part I could feel happening. Fixing the shoulders did nothing. By the time they had gone the cadence had been dropping for six kilometres.
Drill work on fresh legs builds body awareness, and I have no argument with it at that level. The problem is that most athletes treat it as their technique training and stop there, which means the version of running they have practised is the version that never has to perform. Technique work belongs at the back end of tempo runs and inside brick sessions, where the motor pattern is already under stress. The final two kilometres of a race-pace tempo run carry most of the technical value of the session. I have set this out in full in Triathlon Run Technique: What Holds Under Fatigue, which is the closest thing on the site to a complete statement of how I approach the run.
Charles-Barclay ran 2:50 at Roth, which is an excellent split by any standard. Siffert took five minutes out of it. The gap was not a fitness gap in any simple sense. It was a question of whose mechanics were still doing their job in the final third.
09 | What Carries Across to Ten Hours a Week
Not everyone who I work with or who is reading is a professional racing Roth. The relevant question is which parts of Alanis's approach transfer to someone fitting sessions around a job and a family.
More of it transfers than the alternative does. A marginal gains programme built on frequent physiological testing and expensive equipment is largely unavailable to the age-group athlete. Learning to distinguish a genuine Moderate from a genuine Medium costs nothing except the discipline to be honest during sessions where nothing dramatic is happening. Building run mechanics that hold under fatigue is a question of where in the session the form work sits, not how many hours are available to fill.
A professional athlete's fatigue is close to a pure training variable, because sleep and stress and logistics are largely controlled around the work. An age-group athlete arrives at a Tuesday session carrying whatever the day has already handed them. The effort scale becomes more valuable in that context, because it asks what is available in the body today rather than what a plan written eleven weeks ago assumed would be available. I have written about that specifically in the piece on mental fatigue and life stress.
The timeline is the other honest caveat. Siffert found thirty-two minutes in a year as a full-time professional with a decade of competitive swimming behind her. The principles work on ten hours a week. The rate is different.
I should also admit to something less analytical. When Siffert came down the finish chute I was considerably more pleased than a race involving none of my athletes has any right to make me. Part of that is liking to see a young athlete get her result. Most of it is that I have spent years explaining this approach to people who arrive convinced the answer is a better plan or another test. Explaining it is tiring. Watching it win the biggest one-day race in the sport, in front of a couple of hundred thousand people, executed exactly as described, is not tiring at all.
What Roth confirmed for me is that the ideas hold at the highest level of the sport when they are applied without hedging. Fifteen years of coaching suggested they were right. A season with Brett explained why. A twenty-four-year-old switching her Garmin to the navigation page and running the fastest marathon of the day is the clearest public demonstration of it I have seen in a while.
If you want these principles applied to your own race calendar and your own available hours, with the specific gaps in your training history taken into account, Sense Endurance Coaching is where that work happens.
If you want the structure without the coaching relationship, my e <a href="">Sense Endurance training plans</a> are built on the same principles across a 15 or 22 week block, with purposeful sessions, discipline-specific strength, and nothing included that has not earned its place in a limited week. Train what the race demands, finish what you start, and learn to trust what your body is telling you before you need it.
