Passion For Performance

Welcome to a chat with long time HPT athlete Thomas Leuchten.

Tom is a passionate endurance athlete and has a rich history cramming a lot of change into his life. He grew up in Germany and Turkey then moved to England and finally settled in Australia. Listen in to hear about his huge career change, moving across the world and back again to study, riding the Paris-Roubaix Challenge event, mountaineering in Germany and his latest experience dealing with the trauma of a catastrophic shoulder injury which has ruled him out of 70.3 Worlds in December. This one has it all.

This chat starts as we go back to where it all started for Ben and JD. We then take the adventure racing journey with them that lead to them toeing the line side by side and successfully racing the Coast to Coast.

Jeff and Pete start our 2024 series by taking stock, answering the following questions.

• What is Chasing Kona
• What has happened since we last spoke?
• What's coming up

Topics include Whoop bands, Form goggles, food diaries, black swans, white swans, crash replacement policies, upcoming races and future guests.

This episode we sit down with Harry Wiles and have a coach / athlete chat discussing how 2023 went and what were the main challenges of his first year competing in the Pro ranks.

Harry has an interesting history as an athlete. At 16 years of age he took cycling on and raced for the next 8 years competing with good success at the development team level. He then made a major switch and went to CrossFit. After a couple of years though he took on triathlon where after 3 or so years competing as an age group athlete he took the step up to race in the Professional category.

Dan Atkins is the Head Coach of the AusTriathlon Performance Centre on the Gold Coast of Australia. Dan has done it all....from development squads to the Olympics. he has taken his career from being a swim coach where he learnt the skills of engaging, communicating and coaching with a large squad, up to a point now where he is coaching some of Australia's best short course triathletes competing on the world stage.

We had an engaging conversation about our experiences in triathlon coaching and discussed the evolution of the sport, the importance of personal wellness and work-life balance, and the challenges faced by high-performance coaches. Through what was at times a vulnerable chat, we emphasized the need for ongoing personal development, the value of networking, and the importance of recognizing when someone is struggling and offering support.

Steve Mackay is back to talk about Aerodynamics. He covers the theory and its surprising history in cycling and triathlon. With such highly individual and unusual outcomes, Steve concludes that the only way to know what is aerodynamic for the individual is to test it. Which is exactly what we will be doing for the next episide of Chasing Kona.

It's interview time and in this episode we are joined by James Martin. James has been in the sport only 5 years and has racked up an impressive list of achievements already.

• 3rd AG IM Cairns (IM debut) 2019
• 2nd OA virtual Ironman 2020
• 1st in AG IM Cairns 2021
• 1st OA Age Group Athlete Australian Long Course Champs 2021
• 1st OA AAA 2022
• 1st in AG IM Australia 2022

James has qualified for Kona 3 times but for various reasons, including being hit by a car 4 weeks before Kona 2022 hasn't been able to race on the Big Island yet !

All this, plus our usual segments ...Honesty Hour and Coaches Corner.

Fear, Motivation and Communication are my big 3 topics on this episode of The Performance Show. I delve into some pretty big examples of how the best performers in the world use every day skills to become great.

At the top of the show I also give you my Performance Of The Month. A spectacular example of someone with a deep love for their game turns that into success.

In this episode we get Pete to give us his review of what he saw in the first Ironman World Champs to be held in Nice where we had 2 HPT athletes in Darren Alchin and Paul Linton.

We also go deep on season planning, specifically how we can look at Jeff's season ahead leading into quite a busy race schedule.

With the addition of Chasing Kona to the Pod, the OG Performance Podcast gets a freshen up. I speak about my thoughts on what the new high performance program looks like and I have added some new segments .... "What I Saw" and "Performance of the Month".