This is a pretty easy thing to keep in mind, but it’s very hard to do.  Sometimes you may find yourself with lots of energy and pizazz (or just over-caffeinated) on your easy days, making it very easy to overdo it and compromising the workouts later in the week.  If Monday is your day off, then make sure you take the day off and don’t use it to make up for missed workouts from the previous week.  If Thursday or Friday is typically an easy ride day, well, keep it that way so that you can hammer out a few extra watts for the weekend intervals.  Be diligent about training easy when you’re supposed to, and the you’ll reap the rewards from your harder efforts.

Here are some suggestions for things to write about:
- put down realistic goal times for each discipline e.x.: I will swim 1:05, I have trained well in the pool, my form is improving all the time, remember that last time trial, this is totally within my reach
- write key words for each discipline that help you remember essential form cues or things that make you smile to get thru hard times. e.x. for swimming: “long an strong”, “catch”, “fishy”, riding: “pull up”, “patience”, “I rule”; running: “light”, “quick”, “chest up”, “Kenyans move over” etc… whatever works for you and makes you remember important things.
- don’t write passively, use powerful positive language: I will succeed, I will focus on my form and this will enable me to maintain my speed, my body is infinitely more powerful than I know I just need to be in the moment and free myself to excel, if I feel bad I may just need more electrolytes – do a body scan, I will get through hard times…
- write a newspaper headline about yourself “upcoming age-group athlete sets new bike course record”, “Mother of two conquers her demons”, “Irongeezer takes the day”…

Make some notes that fill you with confidence and keep you feeling grounded and mentally prepared. Re-read them every day during race-week, and prepare yourself to go out there and rock out!

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.

Try it some time.  Go out and ride your bike like you’re a kid with a sucker in their mouth.  Go run up to the top of that hill you see in the distance – how far is it?? What if I go anaerobic?? Who freaking cares!! Just do it, you’ll get fitter no doubt.

• 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!!

With race day coming up, try one or two of these ‘non-stop’ days.  You’ll learn something.

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.

One thing, however, is that it almost always seems easier to hold that given pace OUTSIDE, than it does on the treadmill.  You would think the opposite would be true, but we’ve always found that we have to work a lot harder to hit the machine’s pace readout, than to hold that same pace on the track.  Again, we would bet that comes down your body mass being in motion, helping you maintain some speed.

Our favorite treadmill workout is to mix up pace and incline every 5′.

On a 60′ run, something like this:

10′ warm up low HR
5 x 5′ building in speed every 5 minutes (where last 5 or 10′ is faster than goal race pace)
Lower speed to mid range pace or even slower
5 x 3′ building in incline where HR begins to go anaerobic on the final couple intervals (helps to simulate more real world effort)
Straight into fastest pace possible for 2′ on a flat.
Cool down ~8′

Mix it up and play with the intervals.

We find that if we end the day with a “flop” – the above described pool time -  instead of  a long/hard bike, or especially a run, we sleep better and feel more energized and ready to go the next day. Raising your HR by doing a few short, harder efforts (some 25′s fly, 25 sprints etc. ) can help flush metabolic waste products from your system and speed recovery as well.  If you’re short on time, try scheduling the occasional swim workout (a real training session, not just the ‘flop’) as your last workout. It will still help leg recovery from riding and running.

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.

You see some athletes training really hard in January, but hopefully these are the ones that have years and years of solid aerobic base in their systems – not the typical age group athlete that has taken a few months easy/off and needs to gradually build fitness.

Taking the time to train in aerobic zones will help you avoid burn out and extend your season – hopefully all the way to Kona in October.

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.

An added benefit  of monitoring your resting HR is that you may also be able to track some improvement in fitness.  However, this doesn’t always work as it should!  If a fit person jumps into a period of inactivity they can actually see a decrease in resting HR simply because their hematocrit (ratio of red blood cells to overall blood volume) levels will rise, thus carrying more oxygen to the muscles.  But, as a whole, any decrease in your normal resting HR can be interpreted as a good thing – so long as you don’t go down to the 20 BPM range – then it is time to make a trip to the doctor! I’ve heard of low 30′s and even a couple 29 beat per minute hearts, but those are rare and often attributed to abnormally large hearts.

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?”

If you’re a social person, most of the online training logs also allow you to share your workouts with the training community.  Some like this option, some don’t…you can always turn the privacy settings on.

So get logging!!