From the Slopes to the Lava Fields

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Ski-School Wunderkind Ian Murray Carves out a Hot Triathlon Coaching Career.

What's the best athletic resume for a triathlon coach? 

Certainly, a strong swimming background is good, many would say. Running, of course, is key. Without a doubt, cycling would help. And don't forget the years and years of skiing.

Huh? 

Yes, skiing, the thing you do in the snow. And not the aerobic, cross-country type where you get all sweaty and out of breath - but the downhill type. The type where you take a lift up the hill and get to pretend you're named Bodie or The Hermanator or, for you oldies, Jean-Claude.

That's the type of skiing that taught Ian Murray how to be a national-caliber triathlon coach.

When you ask Murray, a popular L.A. Tri Club coach (who recently accompanied American hopefuls on a successful trip to an Olympic-qualifying ITU race in Madrid) how he became a triathlete, he'll tell you a fairly conventional story about how a friend introduced him to it in his mid-20s. In this case, it was his actress girlfriend Alexandra Paul, who once played a TV lifeguard on "Baywatch" and was asked to compete in the 1997 Ironman by the PR-hungry organizers. In the course of her training, in true storybook Hollywood fashion, he became a triathlete - and married the girl.

But ask Murray how he became a triathlon coach, and the story starts a lot earlier. About 20 years earlier, before triathlons even formally existed... when Murray was 6, living with his single, blue-collar, laundromat-managing mom in a famous Colorado mountain town, and learning how to ski in a program called the Aspenauts.

"The coaches kept it fun and sneaked lessons in there," he says. "Skiing is all technique. They had a set progression, a strict PSIA (Professional Ski Instructors of America) philosophy called Movement Analysis. And I liked that." Tennis lessons reinforced the emphasis on technique. Two decades later, after years of teaching skiing himself, Murray would apply the same philosophy of technique-focused progression to triathlon.

While his Aspen high school friends became speedsters aiming for the Junior Olympics, Murray became a technician and teacher. "I preferred mogul skiing and skiing in the trees - when it wasn't cool like it is now," he says. "I enjoyed breaking the technique down, and found that I really enjoyed watching skiers get better." He became so good at helping them ski better that, at 18, he became the youngest-ever PSIA instructor. 

Murray refined his teaching skills by attending Interski, the annual international pow-wow of Austrian, French, Japanese and American ski instructors, and got a wake-up call from Jerry Berg, a legendary ski instructor. "He told me that I had a lot of unnecessary movement and wasted energy," he says. "I was a freedog, as we called it, so Jerry taught me economy of motion, how even the slightest stray motion of an elbow can affect you." Eventually, he and a group of fellow instructors won a world championship in Demonstration Skiing, sort of a ski instructor's Olympics.

But even superstar ski instructors need to make a year-round living. Murray got the acting bug when summer windsurfing trips to the Gorge in Oregon brought him Portland modeling jobs. At 22, after studying theater and English in college, he headed to L.A. and started picking up a few small TV gigs and commercials for Old Navy, Crest, and PowerBar. He also dove headlong into the fitness culture, ramping up his running so well that he qualified for the Boston Marathon, and tried a couple of sprint triathlons.

The latter was no piece of cake. "I could already run. I picked up cycling fast because I'd raced BMX as a kid. But didn't know how to swim at all," he says. "I did the first one with a breast stroke."

Now Murray finishes a 2.4-mile Ironman swim in 55 minutes - he's up there close to the pros. 

The striking progression from non-swimmer to human fish began in 1997 when Alexandra, his Baywatch babe girlfriend, was assigned a coach to train her for the Ironman venture. The coach she got was two-time Hawaii Ironman winner Scott Tinley. 

"The first thing Tinley said was, ‘You gotta race," says Murray. "So we did 11 triathlons that year - and 18 the next. I was completely bitten by the bug." 

He was drawn to that same aspect of sports that had fascinated him since first grade, with his love of lessons and technique. "After all, swimming is 80 percent technique and only 20 percent fitness," he says. "I took from everybody: Terry Laughlin (of Total Immersion clinics) and local master's workouts." 

Noticing his rapid progress in and out of the water and his well-honed teaching ability, people began asking Murray about coaching. In late 1999, having by then picked up some certificates from Triathlon USA and the NASM (National Academy of Sports Medicine), he quit his job as a manager at Malibu's landmark Reel Inn seafood restaurant and became a full-time triathlon coach.

Less than three years from neophyte to coach? "When you're a clear communicator, it feeds on itself," he says, in the crystal-clear, precisely enunciated voice that made him a natural toothpaste pitchman on TV. "Also, to be honest, triathlon is a lot easier to teach than skiing, because it's a lot of fixed distances and controlled environments. A pool and a running track are a lot easier to control than a hill."

QUANTIFYING THE WORKOUT

Murray starts off any coaching assignment by quantifying the lesson with what he calls Marker Sets, which isolates one variable among a series of fixed time and distance benchmarks. Here's how it works:

After measuring the athlete's current ability, Murray sits him or her down and lays out a plan based primarily on making improvements in technique. "I'll say, here's where you are now. Here's what you need to do to improve. If you do this, this, and this, you'll see measurable progress."

Take swimming. If the length of the pool takes the athlete 22 strokes to cross, Murray prescribes skill drills designed to bring the count down to 18 with the same perceived effort. "Veterans can get 10 seconds faster over two or three months of training," he says. "Rookies even more."

On the run, Murray has an athlete initially do a mile at a comfortable pace that he can maintain for an hour or so. If that pace, for example, is 150 heartbeats per minute for an 8:30 mile, he will have the athlete maintain that via a heart rate monitor throughout all subsequent training in order to isolate the effect of improving technique. "A month later, when he does that mile at 150 bpm in 8:22, we know that improved technique just saved him eight seconds."

Ian's rule: Get a comfortable heart rate and stick to it. Then work on improving form. 

An important corollary to this rule is focusing on one technique at a time, which keeps an athlete what Murray calls "mentally present" in the workout itself, and helps lock down that particular skill. "Don't distract yourself by doing four new things at once," he says. "I have them focus on one thing at a time - like a cyclist imagining that he's scraping the pedal along the bottom of the down stroke for 10 straight minutes, or a runner focusing on not overstriding and not heel-striking. After 10,000 repetitions, it becomes a habit." 

If those reps are done with purposeful exaggeration, another teaching method Murray borrowed from skiing, the habit develops even faster. And because he says swimming, like skiing, is all about the hips, he has his swimmers exaggerate their hip action to the point where their entire bodies are momentarily at 90 degrees.

Specificity is key. "Coaches tell swimmers to grab a kickboard to start a workout, but I say screw that," says Murray. "In real swimming, you kick on your side with one arm extended."

A key to all three triathlon sports is good posture, a common problem for triathletes. "You do few things very well hunched," says Murray. "By the time of the run, the body begins to cave in on itself. The remedy is core strength." He prescribes fundamental twisting medicine-ball movements and a progressive series of crunches and body weight squats. Every few weeks the exercises are done with a higher level of instability, such as atop a foam pad, then atop a Bosu ball. "Swim without core strength and your legs will fishtail from side to side," he says. "You need a solid core."

A solid core. Concentrated drills; measurable marker set benchmarks. It sounds simple enough for athletes to do on their own. But few do. "Most athletes say, ‘I'm going out for a 40-minute run or two-hour ride,' and they don't think of technique," says Murray. "So they are out there thinking about the lava fields, and not about skills that improve them.

"Ultimately, it all comes down to what I learned as a kid on the slopes," says Murray. "It's not just ‘practice makes perfect.' It's ‘perfect practice makes perfect.'"  

COACHING TIPS FROM IAN

Here's some key triathlon training principles from Murray in his own words:

FOCUS POINT: Add a technical focus point to every workout. So many athletes head out for training only with some sense of duration and intensity. I ask my athletes to have a focus point in mind as well. It can be something as simple as smooth shifting on the bike or posture on the run. It can be something as specific as air management on the swim or a foot/ground contact point on the run. No matter what it is, the mind has to be present during the workout.

STOP THE SLOP: Only exercise with perfection. If it gets sloppy stop, rest and don't begin again until you are fresh and focused. This might mean only swimming small pieces - one length of the pool perhaps - but swimming it perfectly, stopping, resting and then swimming again. Run well only! If running well means you can sustain it for just two minutes then run well for two minutes and walk for a minute to recover, then run well again. 

>> TOP SWIM TIPS:

1. Stretch out to complete extension while swimming; this means straight elbow AND fully extended shoulder.

2. When breathing, consider turning the crown of your head down into the water and your chin up into the air.

3. Keep a level body position with head depth, lead arm depth, and pressure on the upper chest so that you can swim with almost no kick at all.

>> TOP BIKE TIPS: 

1. Fast cadence: Make the bike go fast with a cadence that is somewhere around 85-95 rpm rather than "mashing" at 60-70 rpm.

2. Foot level: Keep the foot relatively flat through the whole pedal stroke.

3. Pedal an entire circle: Put the shoe/pedal system to work by scraping the bottom of the pedal stroke, by pulling up on the backside of the pedal stroke and advancing across the top as well.

>> TOP RUN TIPS: 

1. Chest out: Run tall and proud with your shoulders pulled back slightly and chest forward.

2. Lift heel and drive knee: Simultaneously lift your heel towards your butt and drive the knee forward, creating a dynamic leg action rather than shuffling the leg forward. Spend less time with the foot on the ground. The foot should just touch and go, not land, roll, hold, then push off - it should just touch-n-go.

Reach Ian Murray at Triathletix.com or CoachedRun.com and you can purchase his DVD training program at TriathlonTrainingSeries.com.

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