Depending on how your winter training schedule is coming along, you may be getting close to some of your early season races and you might want to think about incorporating some speed work (or change up your current speed focus days). Treadmills are very handy for speed work, but there has to be a balance between indoor sessions and outdoor sessions if you truly want to see gains on the open road.
The limitation behind a treadmill is that you are really just trying to keep up instead of propelling your body mass forward. You do work very similar muscles, but it is harder to gain real-world speed. A treadmill is excellent for helping you work on quick leg turnover, and it can be a great tool when you are lacking motivation to push the pace outside, but if you really want to be able to maintain that leg speed during a race you need some outside time on a 400m track, long dirt trails, or smooth open road with no distractions. That said, getting inside for some speed workouts can limit risk of injury. In general, most treadmills offer more shock absorption than the open road (though we’ve been on a couple that feel worse) and you can easily fine tune your pace.
#2: Leave your favorite swim workout in the comments section of this post (use your real email so we can contact the winner).
From there we’ll do a random draw on March 31st 2010.
Important Criteria!!!!: The swim workout does have to be a legitimate swim workout – “400 meters IM” does not count. Break it up into your Warm ups, Main sets, and Cool downs. If you’d like to leave multiple swim workouts, please do so in separate comments so your name will be entered into the draw more than once.
We can all benefit from maintaining good eating habits on our easy, rest- days as well as through the hard training days. Don’t fall into the trap of (too often) rewarding yourself with junk food because you “deserve it”. Your body really deserves high quality nutrients, and those rest days should be packed full of nutritious food because you’ll have more time to prepare the good stuff.
Eating high quality food on rest days (lots of fruits and vegetables) will help ensure that your rest day is actually doing what it’s supposed to – repairing muscle and cell damage caused by hard training.
This is especially true after hard races. The craving for junky food is always at its highest after a race, it feels like a reward for accomplishing the task at hand. Yes you crave salt, but try getting it with a V8 instead of potato chips and fries. If you’re diligent about your food intake you can turn those race days in to your best ever training sessions. Good food first, party food later!
An excellent way to loosen up the ol’ bod from the day’s previous activities is to swim in the evening for recovery. Even if you feel wasted from a hard workout, it is amazing how much better you feel after a dip in the pool to revel at the joy of buoyancy and kick out the legs (if your pool has a good hot-tub, with powerful jets for a leg massage – you’re golden!). If you approach it as a a technique/relaxation session, instead of more training where you pound out the miles with your eye on the clock, you may be surprised at just how fast 2000m flies by and how both your weekly swim volume and your psyche get a boost. Use the time to play, feel the water, and think about your form. Work on those pesky elbows that tend to drop at the catch by doing some sculling; make yourself breath to your non-dominant side if you aren’t a perfect bi-lateral breather; do some double arm back stroke to open up those pecs from hours in the aero position or at your desk; dolphin kick on your back to strengthen your core; work on your butterfly because it’s FUN… the options are endless.
This winter has been the winter of a complete nutrition revamp for us (Heather and Trevor Wurtele – coauthors of all posts on the IMTT site). Some race issues that were slowly becoming a trend (in a bad way) had to be changed.
This post is not about all the factors that affect your race nutrition, just the nutrition itself. Specifically, the concentration and dilution of your carbohydrate intake. Okay, we’ll mention a couple issues first. Adequate training being the number one concern – if you haven’t done the work you will fall apart before the finish line, regardless of what you eat. Issue number 2: Pacing. Simply put, know your limits. 50% of the ‘nutrition’ issues in a race are actually pacing issues. You’ve gone too hard on the bike in order to keep up with stronger cyclists, then blow up half way through the run. There’s a reason why more men fall apart at the end of race than do women…and it’s not because woman are tougher, it’s because most are better at controlling their ego on the bike.
Winter training is a good time to build a solid aerobic base, and this means staying within defined heart rate zones. This can be tricky if you do your riding in a group setting or live in a place with lots of cyclists on the roads with whom to get competitive – damn speedy commuters with panniers! This is when it is important to let go of your ego: yes you can likely outride that person, but not if you stay below your heart rate cap of 145 BPM. If you are out there for 5 hrs grinding away with your Ironman goal in mind, don’t let the annoying dude out for an hour ride who hangs on your wheel and then blows past you on descents, force you to abandon your plan!
If you live in a cold climate and spend a lot of time indoors on the trainer it is generally easier to keep yourself in check. A note – your HR is likely lower on the trainer than the equivalent perceived effort out side so don’t stress if you can’t get it into your usual outdoor zone. The workout is definitely still worth it.
A great little routine to start in the new year is to take your morning resting heart rate. Yes, it can be a bit annoying to reach out from under those warm blankets and put the cold plastic monitor to your chest, but the benefits to knowing what that number should be are worth it. A cozier option is to have your partner snuggle up to your chest and count the beats for you!
The end of your off-season or after a rest week, while healthy (no colds or injuries kicking around) is the best time to establish some starting numbers. From there, you can monitor any irregularities and hopefully avoid the pitfalls of over-training or fighting through a training session when your body is trying to fight off a cold.
Typically, an increase of 10% or more from your base value would be a sign that something is not right. For example, if you regularly see a morning heart rate of 45, but you wake up one day with a HR of 50 or more you’ll want to be careful about how you approach your upcoming training day. If you know it’s not stemming from poor recovery from the previous training day or a horrible nights sleep, then perhaps you’ll want to watch for signs of sickness. Quite often when your body is trying to recover from hard training sessions you’ll open yourself up to a depressed immune system – your resting heart can be the first indicator something is not right.
As we get close to the new year, it’s the perfect time to start up a training journal of some sort. There are many online FREE training logs that allow you keep track of workouts, and plan ahead for new ones. If you prefer not to get online you could also set something up in a good old spreadsheet.
If you’re diligent about keeping track of your workouts you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how this simple tool not only helps keep your motivation high (by allowing you to set weekly goals, and trying to out-do last month), but it will also allow you to train more effectively in future months and years. The magic really starts to happen once you’ve got a full year’s worth of data.
It’s more than likely that you have a vague recollection of what you did last January, but imagine if you knew exactly what you did – it would be so simple to improve on that program and make the upcoming year even more succesful. This works on a month-to-month basis as well. Keeping track of progressing run volume is one of the best ways to avoid getting injured while pushing yourself to make gains. “Ok, you ran 200km in January, can you get to 220km in February?”
Growing up as a young cyclist, one of the lines we always used jokingly was ‘Shammy time is training time’. Meaning that sitting around in your shammy after your ride was considered training time. Obviously not the case, but funny nonetheless.
This tip has to do with your shammy - relative to your saddle height on race day (not the amount of time you spend sitting around in it). Most of us as triathletes will race in a tri-short with a small shammy that doesn’t soak up a gallon of water from the swim, and doesn’t feel like a diaper during the run. However, we often train in a normal cycling shorts with those nice thick pads that ease the bumps and bruises on our skinny butts. The difference between the two is relatively minor, but, it does make a difference on race day if your legs and back are used to having that extra ~5mm of height.
Depending on how your winter training schedule is coming along, you may be getting close to some of your early season races and you might want to think about incorporating some speed work (or change up your current speed focus days). Treadmills are very handy for speed work, but there has to be a balance between indoor sessions and outdoor sessions if you truly want to see gains on the open road.
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We can all benefit from maintaining good eating habits on our easy, rest- days as well as through the hard training days. Don’t fall into the trap of (too often) rewarding yourself with junk food because you “deserve it”. Your body really deserves high quality nutrients, and those rest days should be packed full of nutritious food because you’ll have more time to prepare the good stuff.
An excellent way to loosen up the ol’ bod from the day’s previous activities is to swim in the evening for recovery. Even if you feel wasted from a hard workout, it is amazing how much better you feel after a dip in the pool to revel at the joy of buoyancy and kick out the legs (if your pool has a good hot-tub, with powerful jets for a leg massage – you’re golden!). If you approach it as a a technique/relaxation session, instead of more training where you pound out the miles with your eye on the clock, you may be surprised at just how fast 2000m flies by and how both your weekly swim volume and your psyche get a boost. Use the time to play, feel the water, and think about your form. Work on those pesky elbows that tend to drop at the catch by doing some sculling; make yourself breath to your non-dominant side if you aren’t a perfect bi-lateral breather; do some double arm back stroke to open up those pecs from hours in the aero position or at your desk; dolphin kick on your back to strengthen your core; work on your butterfly because it’s FUN… the options are endless.
Winter training is a good time to build a solid aerobic base, and this means staying within defined heart rate zones. This can be tricky if you do your riding in a group setting or live in a place with lots of cyclists on the roads with whom to get competitive – damn speedy commuters with panniers! This is when it is important to let go of your ego: yes you can likely outride that person, but not if you stay below your heart rate cap of 145 BPM. If you are out there for 5 hrs grinding away with your Ironman goal in mind, don’t let the annoying dude out for an hour ride who hangs on your wheel and then blows past you on descents, force you to abandon your plan!
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