The Best Gear Tips Learned from 15+ Years of Being a Runner, Cyclist, & Triathlete - Coach Tip Tuesday

Many, many years ago, I was a Television-Radio major with a Video Production concentration at Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School of Communications.  My roommate Sally (who was also a Television-Radio major with a Video Production concentration) and I would be hunkered down in our apartment editing video projects late into the night.  Wanting a break from her editing projects, Sally would head out for a run.  Back then (and really, ever since I could remember at that point), I thought running was dumb, and I thought that the idea of running when other people could see me was even dumber.  However, when Sally started running late at night (we’re talking 11:00 p.m. or later) - aka when one could “hide” under the cover of darkness from being widely seen by other people - I decided that I needed a break from editing, too.  I started joining her on these late night runs.  Running started to seem less dumb…and believe me, no one was more surprised than me to discover this.  And so, that’s how my running journey started - with midnight runs around Ithaca College’s campus.

Fast forward 20+ years, and I’m sometimes still blown away when I look back and see that I’ve now raced more than 100 endurance events.  Some of them have been triathlons, others have been cycling races.  Still others have been open water swimming events.  But running races are - by FAR - the thing I’ve done the most of.  For a person who used to think that the cross-country kids in high school were crazy (literally…I’d tell them that I’d never run six miles), it’s a humbling reminder that we are always evolving and changing…sometimes into the exact opposite of what we imagine we might be.

After all of these years of training, racing, coaching, and working in bike shops and run specialty stores, I’ve tried many, many gear items and I’ve also received feedback from thousands of athletes and customers about gear items.  I’ve decided to compile my best gear tips into a single post to share.  Without further ado (and in no particular order of superiority or preference), here are the best gear tips I’ve learned from my 15+ years of being a runner, cyclist, triathlete, and coach.

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Swimming Gear Tips

• Spit into your goggles, make sure it coats the entire inside of the goggle lens, and then rinse them quickly in pool water before affixing them to your face while swimming.  This will help prevent them from fogging.
  • Bonus Tip: Taking goggles on and off - even after doing this - will increase the probability of them fogging up.  Keep your goggles on for the entirety of your swim; this also practices the specificity that you will need to have on race day, when you won’t be taking them on and off every few minutes and you will need to keep them on for the duration of your event.

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• Roll the legs and (if your wetsuit has them) sleeve inside out when you are putting on your wetsuit.  From there, it’s much easier to roll on than if you try to pull on the entire length of the leg or the entire length of the sleeve.
  • Bonus Tip: Once you have your wetsuit on, bend over at the waist and grab the material around your pelvis area.  As you stand back up, you’ll be able to pull the wetsuit into a good position.  Submerging yourself in water and ensuring that water gets into your wetsuit before you start swimming will also help ensure a comfortable fit.

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Cycling Gear Tips

• Ride with lights on the front and back of your bike, every single time you ride.  No matter the time of day, lights will always make you more visible to everyone and anyone who may be out at the same time as you.  This includes motor vehicle drivers, other cyclists, and pedestrians.  I noticed a significant decrease in the number of vehicles that pull out in front of me when I started riding with a front light on my bicycle.  I’ve found that having lights on a strobing or flashing setting is particularly effective and makes you much, much more visible when riding.

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• Do not wear your oldest cycling shorts for indoor cycling workouts.  Too many athletes view indoor workouts as “less than” outdoor workouts, and athletes will often utilize their most-worn gear for sessions that are completed indoors.  When it comes to cycling, indoor workouts require the most padding a chamois (the padding that is sewn into cycling shorts to provide comfort while sitting on a bicycle saddle) can offer.  This is because there is little to no dynamic movement on the saddle/bicycle compared to riding outdoors.

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• Don’t make the all-too common mistake of going for the cheapest possible cycling shoes.  While runners are familiar with the idea that a good pair of running shoes is going to cost at least $140, I’ve seen such a reluctance from athletes to make a similar investment into their cycling shoes.  Buying cheap cycling shoes is the equivalent of buying running shoes at Wal-Mart.  Cycling shoes last far longer than running shoes do (8,000+ miles per pair versus 400-ish miles per pair), and as such, the return on investment for cycling shoes is higher than it is for running shoes.  While $300-$400 may seem like a lot of money to spend on a single pair of shoes (because it is), the reality is that the same money spent on running shoes would have a much lower return on investment, as the same value of running shoes would wear out several years sooner.
  • Broken down as a rate per mile, $140 running shoes that last 400 miles cost $0.35 per mile on average.  $400 cycling shoes, on the other hand, cost $0.05 or less per mile on average.  Get the cycling shoes that fit and function the best for you, and don’t cheap out.

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Running Gear Tips

• Put elastic laces on all of your running shoes.  While these are best known among triathletes because they help expedite the time spent in Transition 2, they’re honestly excellent for everyone.  One of the best advantages of them is that you can set them exactly to the tension that you prefer to have in place while running…and once you set it, it stays the same for the entire time you own and use the shoe.  You don’t need to fuss with finding the right tightness and tension for your laces every single time you go for a run.

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Miscellaneous Gear Tips

• Track the mileage on your gear.  Most importantly, track the mileage on your bicycles, your cycling shoes, and your running shoes.  This helps you observe trends, and can help make you feel better when your equipment and/or gear fails or wears out.  Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever and often, when something fails or wears out, you’ve put more miles on it than you realize.
  • As an example, one time, when my road cycling shoes broke, I looked at my tracking, and I saw that I had ridden over 10,500 miles in those shoes.  I knew they didn’t owe me anything and had more than paid me back for my initial investment in them when I purchased them, and thus, it took the sting out of having to buy new cycling shoes.
  • Running shoes are arguably the most important gear item to track mileage for; running in shoes that are over their lifespan in miles is one of the biggest risk factors for running injuries that I’ve seen.

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• Clean your gear…and not just your gear that happens to be clothing.
  • Heart rate monitors (both the strap style and the optical style built-in to many wearable watches now) should be cleaned at least every seven wears.
  • If you’re riding regularly, clean and lubricate the drivetrain of your bicycle at least once per week.  If you ride in any kind of precipitation or in wet and/or muddy conditions, clean and lubricate your drivetrain after every ride in such conditions.
  • Wash cycling shorts, headbands, and sports bras after every wear; don’t rewear these items.  Doing so can cause undesired issues such as urinary tract infections (which can happen after rewearing dirty cycling shorts) or acne outbreaks (by wearing dirty items that rest on your forehead, back, or chest).

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• If you are using a hydration bladder as your hydration vessel for a workout, ensure that there isn’t any air in the bladder before you begin your workout.  Air in the bladder will cause sloshing to occur, which can get very noisy (and very annoying) very quickly.
  • Bonus Tip: Flipping the bladder upside down and sucking out any air that is in the bladder through the hose is a quick and easy way to accomplish this (and is often quicker and easier than trying to press all of the air out of the bladder without spilling any while trying to close off the bladder).

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• If you use an optical heart rate sensor to measure your heart rate during workouts, wear the watch in the same place and wear it very snugly.  Optical heart rate sensors use infrared light to see the expansion of your arteries through your skin as your heart pumps blood through them.  By measuring this expansion and contraction of your arteries, these devices can extrapolate your pulse rate.  In order for this measurement to be accurate, the optical sensor needs to be very firmly pressed against the skin.  Quite frankly, the tightness required for these devices to be accurate is tighter than most people would default to wearing them.  As I’ve said countless times: Bad data is worse than no data.  If you’re going to look at, leverage, and/or care about the heart rate data recorded by an optical heart rate sensor, you need to ensure that it is recording accurately.  Otherwise, you shouldn’t look at or use heart rate data at all…ever.

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• If you use a chest strap heart rate monitor, be sure to get it wet beforehand.  Chest strap heart rate monitors are electrical heart rate sensors, meaning that they measure the electrical activity of your heart.  Though they may seem to be the same (because the metric they produce is the same), chest strap heart rate monitors and optical heart rate sensors are not the same thing and they use very different mechanisms and technology to generate the metrics that they do.  Once again, bad data is worse than no data.  In order to measure the electrical activity of the heart properly, chest strap heart rate monitors work best and measure most accurately when there is a conductive agent (such as water) between your skin and the sensor to facilitate the transmission of the electrical signal from your heart to the measuring device.
  • Bonus Tip: If you experience chafing when wearing a chest strap heart rate monitor, putting Body Glide on your skin before putting on the chest strap can help reduce that chafing.

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• Body Glide isn’t just great for preventing chafing.  If you wear shoe inserts in your running or cycling shoes and find that they are squeaky, putting Body Glide on the outside of those inserts before putting them in your shoes will stop that squeaking.

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• Don’t set any of the fields on any of your workout types on any of your devices (watches, cycling computers, etc.) to “Current Pace/Speed.”  Current Pace/Speed is finicky and jumpy because it shows you what speed the device is sampling for one second.  As a result, it can fluctuate wildly within a very short (a few seconds) span of time.  Additionally, because it’s not truly showing you what you’re doing, it actually functions as bad data.  Current pace/speed can artificially inflate or deflate one’s ego.
  • Average speed/pace or average lap speed/pace is best because it gives you a true picture of what you are doing for a given workout or interval, not what your device recorded for a one-second sample.  If that feels too “long” to you, set your pace/speed to a 5-second or a 10-second average, which is less jumpy and smoother.

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• Turn off Garmin’s Training Status.  Out of all of the algorithms that Garmin has come up with over the years, this one infuriates and frustrates me the most.

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The Bottom Line

There are probably an infinite number of tips and tricks that I could share about gear with athletes, but these are the most useful and most leveraged tips I’ve learned over the years.  I still deploy all of these tips myself in my own training and racing.  I hope that they prove useful and insightful to you as you take on your own training toward your goals.