We caught up with Cork girl Amy Wolfe after her winning performance at Athy, to see where she’s headed to next and to see if she has any tips that would help us.
IT: Congratulations on your TriAthy victory at the weekend. Is this your best result to date?
Amy Leading out of the water in Valentia
AW: Thanks, I guess it is my best result to date, I’ve won a few races before but none of this size. More importantly though it was my best personal performance as I achieved my own goals for my swim and bike splits, it all just seemed to come together as planned last sat and it is so satisfying when you can see the pay off from training on a wet cold day in February to racing on a sunny June day in Athy!!!
IT: Can you tell us a bit about your swimming background and your route into Triathlon?
AW: As a youth I raced swimming competitively and loved the long distance races ie 800’s 400’s. At college the social life isn’t that conducive to getting up at 6am to swim so I retired to the burial ground for ex swimmers – the water polo pitch, if anything would prepare you for the most brutal triathlon swim starts it is a waterpolo game against the dubs!
Joyce (my sister) was then getting into cycling and I was dabbling in a few road races (as lived in Dungarvan at the time and if you don’t run in Dungarvan you have nothing to talk about at the breakfast table, they don’t do soaps!) So we decided to do our first triathlon, King of the hill in Kinsale in 2005…and it all kicked off from there
IT: Can you tell us a little about how TriAthy went and how you prepared for it?
AW: Honestly the preparation left a little to be desired, I only flew in from holidays the evening before so I was playing bike jigsaw till late the night before! The real preparation was done long before Athy, I had a really solid winter training where I built a lot of endurance and so the last wks I’ve just been trying to bring back some speed and with the rest over the two weeks hols it all seems to have come to together…ping, goes the magic wand!
IT: So where to now? What are your plans for the rest of the season? Is it domestic or international?
AW: A bit of both, I will be focusing on the Europeans in Athlone and then the worlds in Budapest in Sep but you cant beat the Irish races for a challenging course, (I think there is a competition among the counties to see who can get the most wicked of courses in their races and name it appropriately…Hell of the West…Beast of the East…King of the Hill…I needn’t go on) and I love them in a masochistic way so I’ll be doing as many of them as I can too, or managed to get my entry in on time for! I also plan to compete in a few elite, draft legal races, Windsor and maybe London city
IT: We would like to know what’s the secret of your coach ,Peter Kern, to get the best out of athletes and prepare them to the next level,as there seems to be a system. To name a few, Joe Lynch the Duathlon Nat champs this year, Liam Dolan to a new Irish record in 2009, Katharina Baldinger in 2008.
AW: Peter is a talented coach, he does have his edges sometimes and he is definitely not a conventional coach and always full of surprises with his trial and error approach. He scrutinizes his athletes at races as he is very much into race performance and then comes up with ideas how to race faster. I think his success is this ability to analyse every aspect of an athletes performance and pinpoint even the smallest of weaknesses, improve these, resulting (for me) in huge gains. His philosophy is more about making athletes aware of what they need to do when x and y happens rather than following a programme rigidly. Its not about the programme its about the max improvement, but above all HARD WORK, some get it, some don’t …and if Peter tells me the secret of how he’s kept me injury free with my training load then I’d sell it on ebay and cash in!!
IT: A little bit about your training. What sort of weekly volume are you doing and what intensity? Do you have a favourite session? Do you team up with your similarly talented sister (Joyce Wolfe) for many sessions?
AW: Over the winter I was building strength and endurance so that was relatively “low” intensity high volume but in the last few weeks I’ve really been focusing on speed and so the volume has come down a lot the plan is to be in top shape for the worlds in Budapest.
Joyce and I trained together over the winter on the bike and run, favourite session has to be a weekend spin in the wilds of Kerry with a crepe and latte on the top of molls gap. Joyce is now stuck in a big ironman block of training so her sessions differ a lot from mine and now we just team up for chatting sessions post training, as coach always says sometimes there is more than triathlon in ones life.
Amy with her coach; Peter Kern
IT: Wow, with all that training, do you get a chance to do anything else in your free time? What do you do in the off season?
AW: I fit training and racing into my spare time from work, my job is very demanding and takes a whole lot of headspace, but when i’m not there or not doing laps then you are prob most likely to find me eating cake in my campervan by the beach!
IT: What advice would you give for girls looking to improve their performance?
The best thing I did was make the decision to get a good coach with a track record after a season of injury and disappointing results in 2008, the return for that investment is greater than any ‘swing’ pair of wheels! The improvements I have made are down to a well designed plan for my lifestyle, work demands and abilities and this has allowed me to train and race injury free. The confidence I gain from that is priceless and makes training so much more enjoyable.
IT: Thanks Amy, we’ll follow your progress with interest.
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