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.
Continue reading Speedwork: treadmill or not?
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.
IronmanTips (49)
Jared Detroit (8)
Matt (5)
Ben Greenfield (4)
Chris (4)
Erin Lee (erin337) (4)
Sam (4)
automobile sweeps... (3)
Brian (3)
