Lucy Charles-Barclay

My morning routine when I'm training is to wake up at 5:30, have a cup of tea, drive to the pool for a swim, come home for coffee and breakfast, and then do a second session. On non-swim mornings, my routine is mainly just tea followed by coffee.
 
Transcript: "Hey, Greg. Thanks for the question. I have a morning routine when I'm training. So that typically is alarm at 5:30, get up, have a cup of tea, then literally just drive straight to the pool, do my swim, come home. Then I have a coffee, which is the most important thing of the morning, followed by breakfast. And then I'll have a bit of chilling out time, a bit of mobility in there, and then I'll get on with my second session of the day. If there is not a morning swim session, then my morning pretty much has very little routine. It's always tea followed by coffee. But other than that, there is no real routine for non-swim mornings."

I swim 20-30 km per week, bike 10-15 hours per week, and run 50-80 km per week.
 
Transcript: "Hey, David, thanks for the question. So on average, when I'm kind of just training normally, I would swim anywhere from 20 to 30 kilometers of swimming per week. I will bike-- I normally work in hours on the bike, actually, because a lot of my biking is indoors. So I'll do anywhere from 10 to 15 hours of bike per week. And then on running, it's anywhere from 50 to 80 kilometers. So quite a lot but nothing too heroic. I know a lot of athletes that do probably a bit more than that, but I find that that works perfectly for me to tick along and usually keeps me injury free even though I'm sidelined with a bit of an injury at the moment, but I cannot wait to get back to doing those kind of mileage per week."

On the morning of an Ironman, I eat boiled rice for energy and during the race all of my fuel is liquid based with no solids.
 
Transcript: "Hey, Simon. So on the morning of an Ironman, I actually used to eat porridge. But after finding out I was intolerant to gluten and milk, porridge got pretty rubbish pretty quick. So I now pretty much just have boiled rice on the morning of an ironman. Which is super boring, but I know that it's going to give me the energy and definitely not give me any stomach problems later in the day. And then do I eat any solid food during the race? Pretty much no. All of my fuel is now liquid based. So I may have some gels in there but, I guess, that doesn't really count as a solid food. So everything is pretty much very basic, sugar, carbs, liquid based electrolytes. No solids in there. I did used to eat Snickers bars, but they're pretty much been cut out of my diet as well. So yeah, unfortunately, no solids. Just pure liquid based nutrition at the moment."

I use data for training, but not for racing because it can lead to a negative mindset. I may use data when racing if my coach wants to review the data afterwards.
 
Transcript: "So I am big into data for training. I use different platforms just to look at the power that I put out on the bike. I like to track my recovery after training. I'm always looking at my heart rate to get an idea of how fatigued I am. But actually, recently, in racing, I've decided to race with no data. So I will use it in training. I will judge my effort on, OK, this is how many works I'm pushing. And this is how I feel. And actually-- so when I went and won the World title in St. George, I didn't use any data apart from just my feedback of how I was feeling. And obviously, I had the average speed and the speed that I was moving at. But that just kept me in a far more positive mindset because I was like, I feel good. So we're just going to go with I feel good. That's good. That's positive rather than sometimes when you have the data on your bike computer in front of you, and you're thinking that's not the amount of works I want to push. My heart rate's too high. What's happening. You can spiral into a negative mindset. So I definitely will stand by using data in training. I think it's really good to track your progress to see if you're going in the right direction, or are you too fatigued. But in racing. I don't know if I would use it again, unless, for example, my coach wants to review the data afterwards. Because it's probably quite frustrating for them to not have the data afterwards to actually know what I did do. So maybe I would have the data being recorded, but not necessarily look at it."

My favorite swim workout is the Rebecca Adlington set - 4 rounds of 50, 100, 150, 200, 250 (off a one-minute base) with a 300m easy swim in between each round. It's brutal, but it's also really satisfying.
 
Transcript: "Oh, favorite swim workout. Well, I've been a swimmer pretty much my whole life. So I feel like if you could kind of say make up a swim session, it's one of my top skills. It's just like, I'll write a swim workout. But I think one of my favorite sessions is actually quite a hard high-intensity session. And we used to do it as swimmers, and it was actually called the Rebecca Adlington set. And it's basically you do a 50, 100, 150, 200, 250 or as hard as you can, and they're off a one-minute base for each 50. So you get more rest as it goes on, but it kind of lets the lactate build up and develop. And in between each round, you get a 300 meter easy swim, and you do that four times. And I promise that by the fourth round, your arms are like balloons, and you just can't feel anything. But I kind of love that sickening pain of the session. So yeah, that is definitely my favorite swim workout. But it is brutal."

I average 8 hours of sleep a night and recently started using the whoop 4.0 wristband to help improve my sleep and recovery. My tips for getting a better night's sleep include going to bed at the same time each night, not letting the dog in the bed, turning off work related things an hour before bed, and sleeping in a cooler room.
 
Transcript: "Hey, Ed. Thanks for the question. So I average about 8 hours, sleep a night. But I've actually just recently started using the whoop 4.0 wristband. And this has been massive for helping me improve my sleep and my recovery, so I am average in about eight hours, sleep a night, but my kind of training load is much lower at the moment, because I'm in a bit of an offseason period. So I imagine that I'm going to need more sleep than that. With my training load goes up and I do know myself that sometimes I will get 10. Twelve hours sleep when I've done a massive training day just to maximize the recovery. So I'm looking forward to kind of using the whoop just to maximize that and just see kind of if I get more sleep, if I can train harder and look at the more metrics that are involved in that. So that's pretty exciting. But generally my kind of top tips for getting a better night's sleep, are aiming to go to bed at the same time, each night and aiming to get up at the same time each day. I think that just really helps the body, get into a better routine. Definitely not letting the dog in the bed because that just interrupt your sleep. So sorry, Lola. She is now sleeping downstairs. Kind of trying to come off of any work-related things turning your phone off like an hour before. You're going to go to bed, just to let the Mind unwind and switch off. And I actually find going to bed like in a cooler room. Helps me get to sleep a lot quicker. So hopefully some of those tips help you guys out."