An athlete like Alison Tetrick brings a lot to the table. Not only does she have a long history of athletic ambition (playing NCAA tennis and dabbling in triathlon), but she is also an absolute beast on gravel.
Her coach Adam Pulford matches her completely. He calmly helps her navigate healthy recovery practices and enables her to be her truest self, even if that means turning a blind eye to her riding seven hours when she was prescribed a two-hour workout. Together, they make an undeniably successful team and a killer CoachCast episode.
Stand-out Quotes
- “When I bought my first bike, I didn’t know how to clip in, I didn’t have any cycling clothes, but I needed a power meter. Cause that’s what triathletes need.”
- “I didn’t want any training after Dirty Kanza last year. I trained into it, but it was a really just a rough, mentally and emotional year for me… when I reached out to him, I said, ‘I want to train with you.’ And he’s like, ‘Okay, are you actually going to communicate, are we going to do this again?’ And that’s what’s wonderful. I mean, he accepts me for who I am and understands what I need.”
- “We have the canvas right now. So we’re doing some experimental stuff….This week, I wove it in because I could see and hear and listen and I saw the power. She’s taking care of herself. She’s back to sleeping well, the recovery times in between. So I’m going to say, okay, let’s weave in some of this anaerobic capability.”
- “Go ahead, fail forward, is kind of what I’ve told you before. Cause if you fail forward, you go, you explore, you learn about yourself…When you push up to that edge and truly try to do something you’ve never done before, whether it is 90 seconds or 12 hours or whatever, that’s when you really start to learn the good stuff.”
- “It’s not just about that training program, in the details and the specifics, you have to understand how the athlete perceives a training block, perceives intensity, perceives the test.”
- “In my feed zone or checkpoint or whatever, I have everything under the sun and it looks like I’m a 12-year-old kid at summer camp with what I have there. Cause I don’t know what my body’s going to want at hour eight and 110-degree headwind at Emporio Kansas.”
- “So my TrainingPeaks… It’s like a 12-year-old’s diary. I’m like, ‘Adam, so this happened today and then this happened. And so I felt like this, might’ve been hungover. Probably shouldn’t have had that last whiskey, but you know, I still did my effort, my heart rate’s a little elevated due to that.’”
