Episode 14 - Sam Bradley (Warriner), former world #1 triathlete and Commonwealth Games Gold Medallist

Swim Smooth

Today, the boys chat with Sam Bradley (née Warriner), former world #1 triathlete and Commonwealth Games Gold Medallist for New Zealand, after a nine week hiatus following a whirlwind world coaching tour with Nike in Portland, OR and Sydney, Australia.

Sam discusses explicitly how she utilises a mental "switch" to move between her athletic / coaching self and her family life (which both Paul and Adam discuss is something they're very poor at doing). This, we believe, is something which everyone can learn to be better at, especially in this digitally connected age.

We discuss Sam's athletic career which peaked very late at the age of 37 when she won the ITU World Cup Series in 2008. Sam turned to triathlon very late in life and didn't actually turn PRO until 2005, so had a meteoric rise to fame following that.

Sam recently attended the 3-day Swim Smooth Coach Education Course in Sydney, Australia and found that despite having spent her entire career breathing only to her right - through our recognition that "if something's going to go wrong in your stroke, it'll go wrong when you breathe" - we found that she's actually faster by 3-4s per 100m breathing to her left. The interesting thing here is that most of the ITU events Sam raced were on LEFT hand turn courses where it's a significant advantage to breathe to the LEFT (for navigation purposes etc) and not the RIGHT. This proved to be quite an eye-opener for Sam despite how accomplished she's obviously already been in the sport, giving way to the notion that sometimes it's the simple things that can make all the difference.

You can read a lot more about Sam's coaching work at www.sweat7.com and on Instagram @sweat7sam