Sue Reynolds gained fame for losing 200 pounds after taking up triathlon at age 65. A few years later, she stunned the sport by winning a world championship as a member of Team USA. Across the Line shares the story of Sue Reynolds’ remarkable transformation into a world champion, revealing Olympic-level training methods and elite coaching techniques. In this excerpt, Reynolds shares what it was like to start training with an elite-level triathlon coach who has a reputation for being tough on athletes.
I first started working with Darren “Daz” Smith as my coach for running. Before asking him if he’d be interested in coaching me in all three sports, I talked with coaches and athletes who were familiar with his coaching style. They told me he was a brilliant sports scientist who had stellar results, but he also had a reputation for working his athletes hard.
I wasn’t afraid of hard work. But now in my 70s, I needed to consider what the worst-case scenario might be. I scheduled an appointment with my sports doctor to find out if the situation could become life-threatening given my age.
After reviewing all the medical tests performed after I passed out a few months earlier, my doctor said that he didn’t think pushing too hard would cause a life-threatening situation. At worst, I might end up with an injury that required a six-month recovery or caused me to switch to another sport. Those were acceptable risks to me. I knew Olympic athletes trained on the edge of injury—hopefully not crossing that line—and I wanted to do the same.
Having done my homework, I asked Daz if he would consider coaching me in all of the disciplines of the sport. I was aware that he had been very picky about the athletes he took into his D-Squad, so I thought he might tell me no. But to my delight, he said yes!
I wasn’t sure why Daz had agreed to coach me. Maybe, like me, he was driven by curiosity. Could he do with an age-grouper what he had done with elites? Or maybe he was just being kind. Whatever the reason, I was grateful he said yes.
I called my current coach Sara McLarty to explain the situation. That was tough. Sara meant a lot to me. But I also knew this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
My first Zoom with Daz after he agreed to coach me was . . . well . . . interesting. Back in Indiana, I logged on from my home office with dogwoods and redbuds blooming outside my window. But when Daz’s image popped onto my screen, he wasn’t in an office at all—he was on a boat.
Daz and his wife, Liz Broad—a renown sports dietitian—had built a large catamaran they named Crazy ’Lil Thing. They often spent months living aboard with their dog, Shah, sailing up and down the Australian coast. Daz flipped his camera to show me an endless horizon of blue water curving in the distance.
As we got down to business, Daz’s first words were, “You’re unfit. You don’t know what you’re doing . . . and you’re old.” I paused while he watched me intently, seemingly waiting to see how I would respond.
At first, I found his remarks to be off-putting, even hurtful. But then I knew that everything he said was true. I was unfit compared to the degree of fitness I sought. I didn’t know what I was doing compared to the Olympians he had coached. And I was certainly old, now racing in the 70–74 age group. I liked his straight talk and found hope in his message. As an unfit and clueless athlete, I had a lot of room for improvement. That was good news.
“You’re unfit. You don’t know what you’re doing . . . and you’re old.”
The Experiment Begins
Daz told me that he had never coached an age-grouper or an older person before, and he had never coached someone remotely without having first worked with them extensively face-to-face. He said our work together would be a big experiment. That was okay with me. I was also in a new situation. I had never worked with such an accomplished triathlon coach before. I was confident that together, we’d figure it out. And I liked the idea that we were on an adventure together—going places that few, if any, had ever gone.
Daz quickly took control, looking at every aspect of my training in incredible detail and slowly taking charge of my life. I imagined him doing the same thing—or even more so—with the young Olympians he had coached.
Coach-Athlete Communication
He was all in, encouraging me to write daily feedback in the app we were using, TrainingPeaks, to help inform his decisions. I told him that other coaches had commented that I was “data dense” and asked if he wanted to limit my feedback. He seemed unfazed, and I sensed that he valued my input. When I asked a question or if something in my remarks caught his attention, he wrote a response. Putting our comments into the TrainingPeaks app meant I could later do a keyword search if I forgot what he said.
Daz was meticulously attentive. On Mondays, before creating the following week’s training plan, we talked by Zoom. My appearance and tone gave him further clues about how the training was impacting me physically and emotionally. In order to not push me too hard, he needed that input. I never felt rushed during our Zoom conversations. We talked as long as necessary.
Sports Massage
Daz explained that if I didn’t take care of my body, he would injure me. I smiled inside, knowing the bluntness of the remark was designed to punctuate his seriousness. Then he raised his lower leg into view and demonstrated how to self-massage my shins, calves, and feet—which he expected me to do daily.
He also told me that although he was now coaching three sports, instead of just my run, he was not going to raise his fee. Instead, he wanted me to use the money I was saving to hire a professional to do a serious sports massage once a week. “Not the kind that feels good,” Daz explained. “Tell your person that I want him to make you cry.” Again, I smiled at the assertiveness of Daz’s words, but I understood. Some massages are designed to be soothing and relaxing. Sports massages, on the other hand, work on deep muscle tissue and tend to be uncomfortable.
Sleep
Daz also talked to me up front about the necessity for good sleep and daily naps—not to exceed 45 minutes or I would be groggy for my afternoon workout. He also stressed having a nutrition plan that would provide adequate fuel for my training.
Strength Training
Regarding strength training, Daz explained that his approach would be different from my past coaches. Instead of writing stand-alone workouts in the gym or with bands, he would embed strength training within my bike, run, and swim workouts. For example, in the middle of a three-hour ride, I’d do over-gearing intervals where I’d push on a very hard gear at low rpms. When running, he’d insert hill repeats in my runs. And in the swim, I’d do paddle work. That way, he explained, I’d be strengthening my muscles in the same way they were used in competition. That made a lot of sense to me.
No Jeffing!
One of the most interesting (and challenging) aspects of training with Daz was that he didn’t believe in walk breaks during long runs. My previous coaches all included short walk breaks in my long runs, a practice first introduced in 1979 by Jeff Galloway and championed by Bobby McGee, it is still widely accepted today. The purpose of the brief rest intervals was to reduce fatigue and prevent injuries. But Daz wanted my long runs to be continuous—no walking, no breaks. It was exhausting and exactly what I needed to build confidence as an endurance runner.
The Workouts Begin
I began executing Daz’s workouts—two sessions a day with Sundays off. I looked forward to Monday afternoon (which was Tuesday morning in Australia), when I would meet with Daz online. At the start of each meeting, Daz would often show me the ocean and tell me a little bit about his sailing adventure. Sometimes, Liz would walk into the frame and give me a friendly wave or the dog would lumber by in the background.
As we worked together, I came to see the full extent of Daz’s meticulous program. When he gave me a bike workout to do in Indiana, he also told me the exact route he wanted me to take—which meant he had researched the roads around my house from half a world away. And just as Bobby varied my run warm-ups based on the session ahead, Daz took the same thoughtful approach with my swim warm-ups.
At first, Daz wrote every warm-up, length by length. But once he taught me how to write a warm-up myself, he simply wrote “warm up” on my workouts and trusted me to design the warm-up and feel when my body was ready for the main set. I loved both the knowledge he gave me and the trust that came with it. I was aware that he was helping me become a more independent athlete.
Some of Daz’s workouts were brutally hard—some would say ridiculously hard for a 70-year-old. I often wondered if he was testing me, trying to see what I was made of and how deep I could dig. I was determined to meet his expectations—and I did.
During one tough training day, I swam 40 x 100-meter intervals at a fast threshold pace—with only a few seconds of rest between intervals. Including the warm-up, it was almost 5,000 meters in the pool.
Mental Skills
Going in, I had no idea if I could complete the workout, so I focused on one interval at a time. When the later intervals got tough, I put myself in my senses as Jeff had taught me: listening to the peaceful slosh of water, watching the alternating colors of the lane-line buoys, and feeling the pressure of the water on my forearms. The swim became a dance—twelve strokes of my right arm, flip, repeat. Slowly, one at a time, I nailed all 40 hundreds at threshold pace.
Two-a-Day Workouts
As soon as I got home, I ate lunch and took a nap before my afternoon workout—another grueling session. I drove to the Van Fleet Trail and rode for two hours. That would have been taxing in itself, but Daz also added over-gearing strength intervals in the middle of the ride. By the time I got home, I was one tired puppy.
Setting Expectations
Daz rarely said anything when I made it through a hard day. When he did offer praise, it came in just a few words. Once, after a particularly brutal session, he simply wrote, “Good lady.”
I imagined he might have said “Good girl” to his young Olympians, and simply adjusted the phrase because I was too old to be a girl. But I didn’t fault Daz for the word he chose. What mattered was what lay beneath it. He had pushed me further than I believed I could go, and in doing so, had shown me something about myself I hadn’t known before—that I was stronger than I had ever imagined possible.
Those rare words meant more to me than any race result—even my world title in Abu Dhabi. Completing Daz’s hardest training days had demanded more of me than any race ever had.
The more I worked with Daz, the more I appreciated what he brought to training that I hadn’t been able to name before. He never spoke directly about what he expected of me—but his actions made it unmistakably clear. The way he monitored my progress, researched the roads around my Indiana home from half a world away, asked questions that made me think rather than simply perform—none of it felt transactional. It felt like a partnership.
In education, we call this high expectations. Not standards, which are impersonal, a checklist posted on a wall, but expectations, which imply two people in relationship, each accountable to the other.
I didn’t have to wait long to find out what Daz’s expectations looked like when I fell short. When I told him about passing out during a threshold run, hoping he’d see it as proof of my determination, he said simply, “You lacked common sense.” Not a reprimand. Not a withdrawal. Just an honest assessment from someone who believed I could do better. In a toxic dynamic, unmet expectations become weapons. In a healthy one, they become information—and the relationship holds.
That, I realized, was the thing worth naming. Daz expected me to excel—not because it served his résumé, but because we had a shared mission. When I fell short, the expectations didn’t disappear. The care didn’t either. We just went into problem-solving mode and figured it out.
I added a sixth element to my list of high-performance factors: high expectations.
With high expectations paving the way, training continued as we moved closer to the World Triathlon Championship in Hamburg that would take place in July. I had qualified for two events: the draft-legal sprint triathlon and a new event—the mixed relay, where two men and two women each complete a mini-triathlon before tagging the next person. As the final weeks of preparation approached, I had a growing sense that Daz’s program was building something in me—physically and mentally. Whether it would be enough, I was about to find out.
Explore Across the Line
In Across the Line, Sue Reynolds shares a story-driven case study of her transformation into a world champion triathlete.
Reynolds gained fame for losing 200 pounds after taking up triathlon at age 65. In this sequel to her debut bestseller, Reynolds shares her single-minded pursuit of performance, revealing Olympic-level training methods, elite coaching techniques, Overtraining Syndrome, and the dark side of personal ambition.
How good can you be? How hard can you push? Across the Line reveals truths about human limits and shares lessons on balancing joy and the pursuit of excellence.