Training for Elite Athletes: How The Synergy Training Method Helps You by Meeting You Where You’re At

This Ironman Triathlon Athlete Gives Serious Fitness Goals – And Fitness Solutions as Well

Speaking with Janel Willette for my podcast about training for elite athletes and regular people has been enlightening and invigorating. Listening to her, it dawns on the listener how ill health, injury, and strain just tend to creep up on people, even young people. She has not only helped people get fitter, but she also tells the story of helping a 28-year-old man who had undergone back surgery. She speaks about training people not just in their 20s and 30s and 40s but also people in their 60s, 70s, and even older. Taking up the conversation in the second part of my podcast with Janel, I was awed to learn about her bid for the Ironman Triathlon and what it entailed.

The Ironman Triathlon.

Janel has been an elite athlete and someone who would have had crazy levels of fitness and strength to actually do what she trained her sights on. She is someone who managed to do the fastest bike split and qualified for the World Championships. She is someone who worked on and remodeled her body into performing the way she wanted it to. When she was at the World Championships in Guernica in Spain, she set her sights on the Ironman Triathlon. 

Doing an Ironman, which is a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile biking, and a 26.2-mile marathon, the monkey mind tries hard to interfere. Mastering the mind is intrinsic to having a good relationship with your body– Janel Willette

This is one of the most grueling physical challenges that we can possibly dream of and requires a great deal of training for elite athletes. The participants first swim for 2.4 miles, then cycle for 112 miles, and then run a 26.2-mile marathon. Needless to say, very few people can dream of accomplishing this. When Janel first decided to pursue this ultimate fitness dream, she couldn’t even swim. The first task was to get over a fear of water, learn to swim, and then lose weight and achieve the peak level of fitness that would permit her to participate in this challenge.

Synergy Between Mind and Body.

Janel is now retired from the competitive sport after ten years of intense training. However, even at that time, she realized the challenge of controlling what she calls the ‘monkey mind’ that interferes with the process. She realized that mastering the mind is important if one is to have a good relationship with one’s body; if one is to improve the quality of one’s life both inside and outside. This is the reason that Janel’s fitness program lays as much emphasis on mental practices as it does on physical fitness when it comes to training for elite athletes and regular people. She describes how achieving focus and that pinpointed concentration in one area of life carries over and helps us become more effective and efficient in other areas of life as well.

Janel has an amazing story about a 96-year-old man whom she met at the pool, and who asked her to show him how to improve his fitness goals. She describes how he used his body awareness to improve even at that age. She speaks of another senior client who found that she had actually grown half an inch!

Janel Willette believes we don’t have to give in to the aging process. Even as we age chronologically we can try to do our best not to get older and feebler. To know more about her fitness program and training for elite athletes, check out the latest episode of my podcast.