 As the season starts to wind down, for most, it’s a great time to set some fitness benchmarks. Benchmarks are key to tracking improvement and ensuring that your training is actually doing what it’s supposed to do. They’re also a good way to see how much you slacked off during the winter!! Depending on the type of fitness you seek, you may want to keep track of more than just one of these tests.
Test #1 – A flat out 5km (3mile) run test keeping track of heart rate. For the athlete concerned with speed – Olympic distance, Sprint distance type stuff. As easy as it sounds, warm up really well, then giver!! Keep track of your time and Avg HR. In future tests you’ll be able to compare those two numbers and see where you stand. It doesn’t have to be exactly 5km either. Perhaps you have a favorite run route with no stop lights, doing the test there works just as well.
Test #2 – Low HR run test. Sometimes called MAF (Max Aerobic Frequency) tests. These are key for Ironman and Half Ironman athletes. The longer you can run at a lower HR, the better off you’ll be over the course of a long distance event. First step is to know your MAF – here’s a link for that calculation. Once you’ve got that down, you can get on with the test. It is best to do this test on a track to limit variables between tests. Warm up really well, at least 15 minutes. Then peg your HR at your MAF and keep track of your mile splits as well as your average HR for each split. Aim for at least 5 miles and as many as 12 miles if your splits are staying fairly steady. If you see a drop off of more than 20% from your 2nd interval you can stop the test as you’ll be running REALLY slow by then.
Continue reading Set your benchmark
 If you’re reading this tip – you’re lucky. I would consider it one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned as triathletes.
As promised in the last tip about avoiding orthotics, here’s some great ideas to get you going on strengthening your feet. Having strong feet will help eliminate the need to throw corrective support into your shoes, and help you get rid of those lingering injuries. Essentially, what you’re doing with orthotics, is making up for something that’s missing (or wrongly thought to be missing) in your basic foot structure. Pronation or is not necessarily a bad thing, it is your body’s way of cushioning some of the blow from the impact of a run stride. You simply have to have strong feet and ankles to keep from getting injured. A great way to see this is to walk bare foot. If you’re pronating while walking bare foot – why try to correct it with supportive insoles? If anything, orthotics or supportive insoles are a band-aid. They’ll help the problem for a while, but then that part of your body will get even weaker and further problems will arise. We’ve personally had issues with this. We have high arches and assumed we needed some sort of support underneath. What this did was make them weak from under-use (an arch after all is a structure that gets stronger when pressed on from above), and we both developed some annoying pains in our heels and toes. Thankfully we caught it quickly and didn’t simply upgrade to the next most supportive insole.
If you look back into the 70′s when marathons were taking off and most of North America was running WAAAAAYYYY faster than they are now – then you look at the injury rate and the shoes they were wearing – you’ll bring up some puzzling questions. Plantar Fasciitis: quite possibly non-existent until the advent of the well supported, well cushioned running shoe. NOT TO SAY supportive and cushioned shoes are bad, they have their place. Stress fractures are bad. We’ve simply forgotten how to keep our feet strong in today’s ‘latest and greatest do-dad’ shoe market. The well supportive shoe also brings up issues of poor run stride. I.e. They allow you to run with poor form because you’re no longer concerned about how hard you hit the ground with each stride.
Anyway, people have written books on that topic and I think you hopefully get the point. So, how to strengthen you feet.
Continue reading Strengthen your feet
Ironmantriathlontips.com has taken up a new look. Bare with us while we make small changes here and there over the next week, this will hopefully provide a more user friendly experience…and allow the comments to work properly which they rarely did on the past layout.
So, we’ll have another [...]
 This one will no doubt be controversial, and we welcome your comments if you find otherwise. However, we’re pretty hard headed on this topic and can pretty much guarantee (no guarantees) there’s a better (and much cheaper) way to solve your run pains than to get yourself some orthotics or supportive insoles. This is first hand experience as well as some very convincing proof found in not-so mainstream Ultrarunning literature. As triathletes, we’re obviously not ultrarunners, but the debate on whether or not orthotics are useful is definitely worth talking about.
Our findings: they are most definitely a hindrance and cause for further injury. If anything good, they are simply a temporary band-aid to a problem that could be solved permanently through smarter training practices. Issues like IT band syndrome, Plantar Fasciitis, Stress Fractures, Knee Pains ARE NOT taken care of through the use of orthotics and supportive insoles, the problem will be simply deferred elsewhere…sometimes taking as much as a year to materialize into bigger problems.
We’ve found that by strengthening our feet and working on proper run form all of our worries and pains have disappeared (Knock on wood). Stay tuned to Ironmantriathlontips.com to find out how.
Continue reading Avoid orthotics and supportive insoles
One of the most efficient and safest ways to get your race week riding done is to do so on the trainer. Especially those last couple rides before the big day that are simply to keep the blood flowing. For one thing, you can get a quality ride [...]
We always look forward to the latest edition of our favorite sports magazine. Whether it be Triathlete, VeloNews, or the monthly edition of Guns and Knives. But, with 3 weeks to go until an important race…stay away. Nothing good is going to come of the latest and greatest advice [...]
Have you ever been lying in bed and had your heart stop briefly? Only to have it resume with a massive one-off catch up beat? Well, we’ve had this checked out recently and apparently it’s nothing to be concerned about (in our case, anyway. You may want to get [...]
Here’s a great quote from the best running book I’ve ever found. It’s so great I’m not even going to tell you the name (name is below)…but I will give you the quote. This pertains particularly to the winter months, and is geared at improving your run, though you can certainly tackle your riding with the same mentality.
“Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. then work on light. Make it effortless, like you don’t give a shit how high the hill is or how far you’ve got to go. When you’ve practiced that so long that you forget you’re practicing, you work on making it smooooooth. You won’t have to worry about the last one – you get those three, and you’ll be fast.”
So there you go, after this season is over and you’ve got no more races until 2010 – Take it easy, and you’ll be fast.
Continue reading Take it easy
As triathletes we tend to forget the importance of keeping our core and lateral leg muscles strong. By doing the exercises in the video you engage a range of run- specific stabilizer muscles. This can help prevent injury – namely hip, knee, and ankle injury (provided you don’t over [...]
 A great way to monitor your improvement and work on appropriate pacing strategies is to set up training loops. Depending on the length of your ride or run you would ideally cover the loop between 3 and 12 times…or more. This then gives you a tremendous amount of data to look at and see where you start to slow. If you keep track of your average HR and lap splits, you can also compare week to week or month to month to ensure you’re making gains in your training. There are a few different ways to go about tracking your loops:
#1. Peg your HR at a particular level and just keep running or riding while taking splits every lap. You’ll most likely notice a drop in time after every loop – but the fitter you are the less that drop will be and the faster your overall time will be at the conclusion of your chosen distance.
#2. Start slow and get faster throughout. This is a great way to learn how to pace properly. If you can do the first loop in 10 minutes, try and drop a few seconds every subsequent loop until you hit your last lap. This will take practice, no doubt, but it will give huge insight into how hard you can actually ride or run at the beginning of an Ironman leg and sustain that pace right till the end.
Continue reading Loop it up
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About this site:
These triathlon and endurance sport related tips have been compiled by Heather and Trevor Wurtele over the years of their progression from working age-groupers to full time professional triathletes. Heather is now a 4 time Ironman Champion and top 10 World Championship finisher. Trevor has an Ironman PR of 8:22 and a 2:51 Ironman marathon.
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As the season starts to wind down, for most, it’s a great time to set some fitness benchmarks. Benchmarks are key to tracking improvement and ensuring that your training is actually doing what it’s supposed to do. They’re also a good way to see how much you slacked off during the winter!! Depending on the type of fitness you seek, you may want to keep track of more than just one of these tests.
