PowerUp Tri Podcast Episode 27: Sarah Crowley

The PowerUp Tri Podcast is hosted by former pro triathletes Matt Lieto and Jordan Rapp, who lend their in-depth knowledge of the multisport to the Zwift Tri audience.

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Anyone who’s been around a successful endurance athlete knows they are only as strong as the team set up around them. No other athlete that I’ve interacted with is more aware of this than Sarah Crowley. Sarah is always so gracious when it comes to giving credit to her support team, and this is especially refreshing in an individual sport where you don’t always find credit given where it’s due.

If you look back at Sarah’s very successful career so far, you can see that one of the team members who has been there through most of her success is her coach, Cameron Watt. We thought there was no one better to chat with about that coach/athlete relationship than Sarah.

Having a good coach is important to an athlete because the coach develops individual workouts with specifics for best physiological gains. But it goes beyond that, as Sarah explains: “I guess the bigger factors have been for me, ones like building your season out correctly, picking when you peak, and managing your own personal stresses.” It takes an outside vision at times to be able to look at the bigger picture things like this and it’s a coach’s job to help weave personal life and sporting life together. Yes, that means the coach often acts as a psychologist as well!

Beyond preparing physically, one thing Sarah and her coach have done so well together is getting her mentally ready to try and achieve her goal of becoming a world champion. One way they’ve done this is by picking big races where she gets to battle against the athletes at the top of the sport. “We consistently try to race them so that when we get to Kona, you’ve got to deal less with the mental stress of who you’re racing and you can kind of cope with that at that higher intensity racing environment.”

There was much more from Sarah about the importance of the coach/athlete relationship in this episode. We also hear from her on how this year has been quite different than most, we discuss some new Zwift updates, and pick Sarah’s brain on what she learned in her first Z Pro Tri series event (besides learning that racing at 1AM her time is hard).

There’s lots of other good stuff in this one, but mostly a great chat with Sarah: a smart and truly humble champion.

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