Since I was a child and for as long as I can remember, I have always been very curious, I loved learning new things and sport and athletes have always captured my attention and my imagination. For me it all started as a viewer of RTP2, at the time, in the 80s and early 90s, the only portuguese television channel of the existing 4 that covered major sporting competitions other than Football. I remember watching, together with my parents, several Rosa Mota victories in marathons, the dramatic 5.000m final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics when Domingos Castro lost the medal in the last meters to a German athlete, Alexandre Yokochi´s 9th place in the 200 breaststroke in Seoul, still the best result ever in Olympic Games by a Portuguese swimmer, Paulo Guerra making podiums and competing with the best African athletes in cross-country world championships and Fernanda Ribeiro’s victory in the 10.000m in Atlanta 1996.
As a child, after a brief stint in gymnastics, it was swimming that captivated me. Mastering the aquatic environment, the 4 swim strokes, the various turns, etc. In swimming, I competed in short and long course and open water events.
During the summer school holidays, my mornings were spent training at the municipal swimming pool in Tomar, during the morning, and in the afternoon my teammates and I often did 18km cycling (mountain biking) to Albufeira do Castelo de Bode where we spent the afternoon swimming and a couple of hours later we made our way back home. In July, after lunch, I religiously watched the Tour stage, after which I left feeling inspired to do my usual road time trial on a mountain bike of around 10kms. When arriving, I wrote down the distance covered, V.average (km/h), etc. in a notepad.
After completing the 9th grade, when asked what area I would pursue, I already told all my colleagues and teachers that I wanted to be a physical education teacher. In secondary school, over the 3 years in the Science area with the option of sports, the taste and curiosity increased. This was followed by a degree in Porto. It was a remarkable 5 years that allowed me to learn from the best teachers, the vast majority of whom were also coaches with proven experience in their modalities and scientific areas.
As soon as I completed my degree I had a job opportunity at the “Os Belenenses” Football Club as a swimming teacher and assistant coach in the cadet category – competition. I was in my natural environment, swimming, where I could help others and convey to them the taste, pleasure and overcoming through the aquatic environment. I stayed here for 3 years, a position I combined with being a physical education teacher.
During this period and with the encouragement of my friend Bruno Salvador, I took the Triathlon Coaching courses of grade I in 2005 and grade II in 2007. In the summer of 2007 I accepted the invitation from the Clube Olímpico de Oeiras (COO) to start a Triathlon school in Jamor. It was an opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and challenge myself in a sport that I didn’t master. At the time, the theory and methodology of triathlon training was taking its first steps and there was no body of validated knowledge and practices as there is today. That’s why in 2009 I started my master’s degree in high-performance training at FMH, where I had the opportunity to acquire theoretical knowledge and practice in the use of methods and techniques for controlling and evaluating performance, especially during data collection for my master’s thesis where I had the opportunity to study the influence of cycling on running in age groupers and national team triathletes.
In the work carried out at COO over 16 years, I was lucky to have had the opportunity to accompany a large group of triathletes from their learning to train phase to High Performance. These were years very rich in learning where I consolidated my practice and my own methodology, always based on current scientific knowledge but also with a close eye on training practices and philosophies of countries and coaches who stood out in the field.
Having finished this 16-year cycle at COO I recently started working on my own on the TriEndure project, this time with athletes more focused on long-distance Triathlon, running and cycling. In this specific case, the quantity of athletes a coach harms the quality of that work and that is why at TriEndure we prioritize quality work over the quantity of athletes we coach.
I face TriEndure challenge with the same spirit as my youth: restless, curious, passionate and eager to learn, to share my experience, knowledge and to make things happen together with the athletes who come to me.
Schedule a meeting with us now to learn about the different technical framework options we have available.
Stronger Together,
Rodolfo Lourenço
