Once in awhile you have to leave your devices at home.  Forget the GPS, forget the heart rate monitor, forget the power, forget your interval timer and portable lactate measuring kit.  Who cares how far you ride, who cares how long it takes you to run your normal route.  Heck, don’t even count your laps in the pool.

All this stuff is great, and don’t get us wrong, we use them (maybe not the lactate thing).  But, on more than one workout during a week we will forget all the numbers and just go workout.  We look at the clock when we leave, and look at it when we come back.  Sometimes not even that.

This gets you in tune with your body and allows you to really enjoy the training and realize the purpose of it -simply to make you feel good and improve yourself physically.  Do you really need to know that your avg HR was only 140 for that 5 mile stretch?  Yes, on some occasions you do, but once in awhile it does not matter.  We would even be willing to say that MOST of the time it does not matter.

Continue reading Forget the numbers

When you’ve got a long day of training on tap, one involving all three sports, consider basing yourself out of your car or gym locker for the day.  It’s a great way to speed up the switch from one sport to the next, and it eliminates any temptation to sit on the couch for 10 minutes (which can turn into a couple of hours).  You’ll also find that it:

• Helps teach you what works well nutritionally on a long day
• Helps your body adapt to the changes from one sport to the next
• Gets your training day over with sooner
• Is easy to co-ordinate a day like that with your training partners, if they do the same
• Helps your race day organizational skills (there’s a lot of equipment and food to deal with)
• Keeps you from skipping the last workout in favor of that comfy couch!!

Continue reading Don’t go home

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?

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.

Continue reading Swim for recovery