TriSMART's Head Coach and founder is Mark Farquhar.  A highly experienced love for sport, a passion to help mentor and support others and gains as much satisfaction from his athletes success as he does his own.  Mark's approach to continuous learning ensures he keeps up-to-date with all the latest coaching strategies, the latest technology and a smarter way to train.  

 

Coaching Philosophy

1. Relationships

   • Mark believes that getting to know each athlete is key to building the foundations for any coach/athlete relationship.  Training is not just about the sport, it's about finding out what makes the athlete tick, what excites them and what is their inhibiter. This allows for greater understanding around building a training schedule that works with the athlete's needs, family/life and work commitments.  Mark understands the busy lifestyle of full-time work, family, young kids and community or club involvement requires careful planning, compromise and sacrifice.

2. Training

   • A training schedule should be very individual, progressive and challenging, yet flexible to meet the needs mentioned above.   Goals setting are very important to coach/athlete to ensure everyone is on the pathway and to help generate motivation.  Goals should be short, medium and long-term and can be process or race specific.  ​

3. Mentoring​​

   • Over the years Mark has found that a coach ​provides much more than just training sessions.  Its the other things that people often forget about when looking about a coach or taking on a large challenging goal.  Accountability to know that a coach is monitoring all your training, support when you are injured, advice for race prep, mentoring when the motivation drops, the list is endless.  This is why I believe having more regular contact is important.

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Mark is a sports enthusiast, playing rugby from an early age and progressing to one of the top clubs in Ireland for almost 15 years, shortened only by a neck injury.  Mark was a Rugby Prop (weighing 120kg) and transforming into a 14 x Ironman finisher (Personal Best - sub 10 hours, weight now 80kg), a keen Time Trialist, and Road Racer, Mark also has a passion for running from 5km up to Ultra marathon distance.

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Mark has qualified for the Ironman World Championships and Ironman 70.3 World Championships.  Over the years, TriSMART coached athletes have qualified and raced at Ironman World Champions, National Series Podiums and Championships at various distances.  But not all athletes are chasing podiums.

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Podiums or First Timers

TriSMART provides coaching to a variety of athletes from podium chasers to first time triathletes.  At TrisMART we want to see everyone achieve their goals, whether its a finish line or finish time.

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Mark has gained invaluable experience from some of the countries leading triathletes and coaches and this added to his sporting experiences has helped to shape TriSMART Coaching.  An innovative and SMART way to train, TriSMART will focus on continual analysis and performance monitoring.  Continuous feedback is crucial to any athletes progression and this at the heart of TriSMART.

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