A good days training

Me doing the London Fields 5k Swimathon

After reading an article by Dave Scott in this months 220 magazine I got to thinking about how many sessions a week I do where I come out feeling like I achieved my goals and felt good in the process. Some of the training I do is to get the session done... I strongly believe in consistently repeating the same weeks sessions until they start to feel easy at which point volume or intensity are increased. My tightly scheduled week means I know what I am doing when and what my goal is. Most of my sessions are tailored to fit in the long run and bike each week. After the 5K swimathon (1hr 20mins) which I did three weeks ago I have now also made a commitment to a long swim (>4KM) every week.

So this year I have reduced some of the length of my non endurance sessions and put a greater focus on quality in each session. So far it seems to be working. But it is challenging. It seems to be much easier just to get in the pool and knock out 3km than it is to do a set of drills, main set etc. Like wise cycling where for each session I have always figured more is better, but am now starting to focus on more specific sets in each session.

So yesterday I had a new wetsuit to try out. A zone 3 aspire swimsuit to replace my blueseventy helix which I don't think ever fitted me properly. It went on nicely but does seem a bit thin. Once in the water though I was more than happy. I proceeded to do my quality endurance set of the week which was a warm up and drills followed by 30 x 100 of 1:50. The goal is to keep the 100s consistent with a rest of 15-20 secs. I have been building this up and aim to be doing 40x 100 ny peak week. Funny things started to happen. Firstly I kept coming in on 1.25-1.28 which is about 5 secs faster than I expected (even with a wetsuit) secondly I got faster as I went on. With 18 reps done I decided to up the ante and did the next 12 of 1.45 coming in each time on 1.25 and putting in a final dig of 1.18 for the last 100.

Put simply that is the best swimming I have ever done! Which considered it is off the back of 2 x 20 hr weeks of training (pretty much my limit) suggests am I in good form. Or maybe this wetsuit gives me superpowers! Which of course gives me something else to worry about... can I keep the form and will my superpowers disappear?

Training in the Gaps

One of the problems with training for an Ironman is having to work in the gaps in between training sessions. I am sure there are plenty out there who at my age (42years as you ask) have completed part 1 and 2 of their life plan through some successful business enterprise which they have managed to achieve alongside rearing a family. I imagine these guys who now have to commit a few days a week to keeping business ticking over and have the luxury to devote several days a week to focused training.

I know of several people who are out there "living the dream". This can take various guises. Some sell up and take to the road in a hope of achieving elite athlete status, some just want to give it their best shot and decide to take a few years as out of the mainstream, and some try to make it a new business venture combining their passion with coaching and training to create an all round triathlon lifestyle. For those of us who seek to augment their life through ironman these options may be a step to far, and besides I quite like my life the way it is. The challenge is as ever to find the gaps to train in.

This saw me getting up at 6 on sunday to then cycle my bike into work where I had a few patients to see. I then cycled in an arc keeping within 30 mins or so of work in case I had to respond to an emergency calling me back into work. I focused on doing some hill reps where I worked hard on each steady climb. After a few hours of this I then headed back pushing hard on the bike in time for lunch at my mother in laws, to celebrate mothers day. This was a relaxed affair with good food and cake. After about an hour stop I was back on the bike setting off towards home and threw in a few laps or Regents Park to bring my ride time up to the allotted 5+hours. I found that my energy levels remained good in spite of the stop start nature of the ride. Once home a few domestic chores were sorted before I took my children to their swimming lessons, and combined this with a 45 min HR capped run and about 20 mins stretching before watching the last half hour of their lesson to show them some support.

Finally I got home cooked supper and slumped onto the sofa at about 8.15 to watch Robin Hood with the kids before bedtime.

That was a fairly extreme way of getting a long ride in but it worked. Some days it does not and that can be frustrating. Would I like to have a day off a week to train in? Sure I would but I cannot justify it against the other demands so I just need to keep training in the gaps whilst I enjoy the challenges of work and the love of my family.

Planning the season

2011 looms large and I am going to try a few things differently. Specifically I am going to race a bit more to se if this gets me faster. I plan to use the races to build up my speed and hopefully will see me setting some new PBs.

So my season goes
1oth April Dragonslayer Duathlon
8th May Marshman HIM
28-30th May Tour of Wessex (3days x100miles+)
19th June UK HIM (wimbleball)
3rd July Ironman Austria
31st July Ironman UK

then I will see if I have any desire t race again.

The plan sees a race every 3-4 weeks but each has a role.

The duathlon is really just a run out for my new tri club London Fields Triathlon. I thought about it last year and regretted not registering. It is a challenging race as the bike is 20 laps around Hog Hill race circuit which has a mean little hill every lap. The aim here is to generate some hard bike speed (and a bit of running as an added bonus).

Next comes the Marshman which is a nice flat course and a chance to see where my training is. It will be a controlled race but it will definitely be a race and not an expensive training session. I hope to see a steady bike split sub 2.30 and then a low 1.3* 21 km run.

Next comes the ToW. This year I will try not to dig such a large hole on the first day. The training effect I am after is to develop some serious muscular endurance, the hills will do that, but recognise it usually takes a 4 day reccovery slot after before my training can start up as anything more than recovery.

Once recovered I will have two weeks of peak training culminating in HIMUK and here I am not too sure. I will be exactly 2 weeks before IMa and as such is quite close if I have a bad day and it is not really a course on which you can ever take it easy. the run especially is quite tough. I am hoping that my fitness at this stage will see me having a solid race but may even consider a run walk strategy for the run to avoid trashing my legs oo much. The next two weeks will be a taper/transition hoping to get me to IMA in a race ready state. I think my revoery from HIMUK should see me just peaking at IMA so long as the fatigue I have built up can be shed in the last 14 days.

I know IMA well and it is a course that suits me as long as the sun dont shine too much.

4 weeks later and I will set of for IMUK. The plan for this will be to train through with 3 weeks of steady work (OK some recovery but back on the bike for a long slow) ride the following sunday) and see how I go. I have raced IMs 6 weeks apart and felt great. Not sure how this will go....

.. but I like the plan.

Honesty and Process

I am currently reading an excellent book by a surgeon, Atul Gawande, called complications in which he talks specifically about how and why complications occur in medicine but also calls extensively upon evidence from other areas of society in particular industrial processes and aviation.

Clearly if you are responsible for the safety of others, such as the CEO of an airline you want to know you pilots and planes are as safe as they can be and that you are going to "minimise" the risk of any "incidents". Airplane crashes cost lives and business, and as a consequence the aviation industry has some of the most complete process analysis of risk and an understanding of how to minimise this risk. The weak link in this is usually human beings. Protocols are no good if they are not read, taught, understood and applied. Human beings may also do all of these things but unlike a computer may decide to ignore them, forget them or remember them incorrectly.

The challenge in medicine is that the range of variables you have to account for are far greater than those that affect the aviation industry, but even where there are well defined protocols and limited variables, Doctors will often go with their gut instinct when making a diagnosis. Now your gut instinct may well be quite good as it generally represents your subconscious brain representing your experience and knowledge from previous similar situations. However the evidence suggests that where we vary dramatically from standard diagnostic protocols we are more often wrong than right. In other words we should go less with hunches and more with evidence- and computers give us that evidence. Computers diagnose heart attacks on an ECG more effectively than humans- fact. Computers (when fed with the right data) are more accurate at diagnosing appendicitis than humans- fact.

So why is it that humans often continue to go on with a pattern or process that if they viewed the evidence more carefully they would realise is the wrong decision? This has something to do with what drives human behaviour. Anthropologists would have us believe that whilst many of us are happy to go with the flow or follow process it is the rebels amongst us who choose to do things differently that are exhibiting the human traits that have made us the most successful* species on the planet. It is the rebels that take risks that can find new advantages in the ecology thus increasing their likelihood of procreation and survival (before we all got sophisticated and started wearing Lycra).

However as we start to get a greater and greater grip understanding of the science of a whole range of situations the advantages of the "rebels" start to be lost to those who are most adept at understanding and applying the science.

So finally we get to triathlon. It has to be said that most of the knowledge of training and exercise is based upon very poor science. If you want to know whether training regime a or b is better you need to get a large number of similar talented triathletes. Get them all to train strictly to either of the two regimes and then test them all in an equivalent valid test at the end of the raining process. Given everything we know about what affects performance including periodicity, diet, general health, weather and god knows what else the trial would have to include hundreds in each training regime to give us reliable evidence. so currently a lot of training is not based around science but about "gut feeling and experience" based on a coaches previous observation of the effect of training and their outcomes.

This is still a long way from the optimum but you can see how the "science" is starting to creep in such as in this post on the EC post how the scientific knowledge can be used to predict a certain level of expectation. So lets here it for the barefoot funning.... the science suggests that it is a quick root to injury for many and there is no evidence it helps you to run faster. But is that the point?

Running faster?

For all of you out there who struggle on the run I am trying to find the answer. The strategy of IM pacing in full of nuance, dark arts and so on. As a 6x IMer I have always raced on feel and my best race had a 3.38 marathon in it. My PB for a standalone is 3.18 but that was 5 years ago. I know that I dont run well on hot and hilly courses (see Lanza and then last year at IMDE where I think the heat got me). The challenge for me has been to significantly improve my run endurance so that translates into a faster IM marathon.

I have tried a variety of ways to reach the targets I set for myself. Volume I think is part of the key and I have certainly raced better of a solid block of 6 hr run weeks but as a time limited IMer this is often difficult, if I am to maintain the bike volume of typically 9-12 hrs during the build phase and to keep 2.5-3hrs of swimming in the mix. This year I achieved my volume but it was all done at a steady pace never exceeding my IM pace. This was based on some observations that until you are targetting a specific volume (say 6 hrs running a week) speed work is unlikely to be beneficial for an IM racer unless you are running right up at the front of the pack. I liked the idea of this since it should "lock in" your race pace and maximises the benefit of each session by avoiding the hangover into the next session associated with faster running... But I often found myself running fatigued and plodding away doing my own version of the IM shuffle but in training.

I think that in order to run well you need to train to run with good style so that you learn to recruit the right muscle groups and get a good balance and style. I think to achieve this you need to either be doing drills when you are fresh (a state not commonly associated with an IMer in the midst of their build blocks of training) or you need to find another way to promote more balanced running. The obvious option is to either do some speedwork or hills or both. The advantage of this is it engages my brain a bit more so I am not merely slogging out another run but I am thinking about the session and hopefully will increase training effect. As ever there is always a balance which is the risk associated with increased running stress. Now I am sure for you 65kg types with a good running history their is probably less of a need to focus on the running training in quite the same way. But for the heavier athlete we need to develop the strength to go with the endurance since we have got more mass to carry.

So having decided this year I will concentrate on trying to get a faster IM mara time and see where I can cut back on the bike training hours without losing the important bike strength. I now just have to work on and implement the plan... which for me means an ever more cautious approach to how I increase my run stress and a hope that this years prehabilitation in the gym is gonna help strengthen me so that my body can greater withstand the demands placed upon it.

To this end i have joined RussC in the advent challenge which has helped push up the run volume this month. Next month I will go back to a more balanced 3-4 run week but try to keep the overall volume about the same building towards an early April marathon (sussex or brighton) as a staging post and also an attempt to get a 3.14.xx so i can go GFA in the Virgin London Marathon in 2012!

so there we have it. time to remember how to ride a bike!

Habits of partially achieving ironman

I am currently engaged in a process of attempted personal reprogramming to try and understand how to maximise my potential as a manager of people. Some may have read Stephen Covey's 7 habits of highly effective people, but to be honest I dont know that you are missing too much if you gave it a miss. If you have read it or are a self help/self improvement book junky then you will appreciate the importance he places on developing long term sustainable "habits" of behaviour that can support your personal achievements...

Reading about these habits it sounds like IM training all over again and there are clear parallels between the habits required to achieve your life goals and those required to be successful in Ironman. The important factor amongst all of this is achieving life balance in any pursuit and to extend the good habits to all aspects of your life. This means it is no good to aspire to be the best at IM if you dont adopt all the behaviours that will maximise your potential. Its not just about completing the training schedule that you set for yourself (hopefully a realistic and achievable set of plans) although that in itself is a Major part of the schedule but it is also about the other stuff... What other stuff ?

Well when you finish your long sessions do you take care of sorting out your recovery food, get some rest, remember to clean the bike, log the details of your training session (where I am sure you monitored HR and effort). Do you do your stretches, core strength exercises, always do the full warm up, or do you go to hard when you should be going to easy, go to easy when you should be going hard. Had an injury and not done all the rehab you should have done, binned a session because bed was to comfy and the rain a bit wet. Probably not because you are all Ironman right!

The one thing you learn is that you need to get consistent, do the same thing again and again and slowly it gets better, faster, stronger. This is the habit that leads to successful IM racing. Without this basic habit you can forget about your build, peak, muscular endurance, taper and all the other details of IM racing. There are no shortcuts to consistency.... but also if you are to sustain and grow as a person or as an Ironman you need to apply these habits to your personal life; be consistent in your relationships, be consistent in your approach to work colleagues whether they are the boss or the office cleaner and most of all be consistent in your goals and personal expectations.

That which does not kill us..

.. makes us stronger (Nietzsche 1844). This is pretty much underlying principle of ironman training, though it is perhaps not a good idea to push yourselves too close to the limit, since for most of us it is a hobby and not a matter of life and death.

What is certainly true is that the achievement in finishing an ironman race to the best of ones abilities can inspire confidence and a sense that one can overcome all sorts of adversity. Achieving your goals in an IM race will involve a significant period of sustained suffering which is in turn built upon a solid foundation of regular and prolonged training, and further suffering. The reward comes not only in that endorphin euphoria of the finish, and the restless night that often seems to follow race day as you lie with aching legs and sunburned and chafed limbs, but in the knowledge that you set out to meet a challenge, followed through with your plan and delivered.

These are important life skills that do you well in a whole host of other scenarios whether it be managing an injury or illness, setting out on a new business plan or indeed learning a new skill. Taking and applying that perseverance to your life challenges, and the knowledge that you know how to carry out your plans and deliver are valuable attributes. Ironman therefore can teach you how to be better at that which you choose to do, you just need to remember the lessons it teaches you.