Mark Dooley Says Selle SMP Saddle

11 Days Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Many thanks to Mark Dooley for the Selle SMP saddle recommendation. I bought my Ksyrium wheels from Mark a while back and he was kind enough to check in with me after he read about my arse issues. After years of ultra cycling he's getting into ultra running and has connected with GUTS. Rock on Mark! We're emailing back and forth right now, discussing the various models in the Selle SMP Strike product line. Saddles are a personal thing... every body is different. The Pauls like the ISM Adamo but it didn't work for me. This Selle Italia disaster was my own doing. It's always good to start with somebody else's recommendation because there are a lot of saddles out there. I'm hoping to get an order in tonight for a new one. Fingers crossed.

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Paleo Nutrition Rebuild in Progress

14 Days Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

For the last couple years I've held my body weight in the low 160's. In the last month I've come to believe that this wasn't optimal.

How'd I get to that weight? I naturally sit at 173-176lbs, eating whatever and whenever I want. A couple years ago I started major calorie counting and diet control in the name of performance. I trimmed calories and tuned my macronutrient balance (carbs, fat, protein.) Weight slowly came off and I found myself at a lean and muscular 160lbs.

Running speeds increased. Climbing on the bike felt like butter. Situps and core workouts were easier. Plyometrics was fun. I had a four pack... WoOT!

All good stuff. So I settled my diet into that low 160's zone. And things continued to be good for a while. I even set Ironman PRs.

But over the course of many months I started to feel underpowered. On the bike and run I frequently felt that I wasn't able to anti-up like I had in the past. But my times were still decent. No reason to suspect diet... it was probably just something in my training (non)protocol.

Fast forward many more months and the times started to decline. Something was up. But still, I blamed protocol.

Finally I looked at my diet. I haven't counted calories in years. I thought I was doing well because my body weight was in the target zone. But when I did an actual analysis of what I was eating I wasn't doing very well. Too many carbs. Junk food. Pasta morning and night. Not nearly enough protein.

This idea of a nutritional rebuild had been rumbling around in my head for a while when I saw that Joe Friel put out The Paleo Diet. The notion that we need to eat the fuels that our metabolic pathways evolved on immediately resonated with me. To summarize The Paleo Diet (poorly): eat natural stuff... not processed foods. Lots of bananas, apples, salads, chicken breasts. I ordered the book and started to eat better.

Doing the workouts I'm doing at this point in the season I should be getting 0.9 - 1.0 grams of protein per pound of body weight. That's about 160 grams. Over the last couple years I thought I was doing well because I had a scoop of whey before bed. That's 20 grams. During those two years I probably also ate an average of 20 other grams of protein... if I was lucky. Too many pasta meals. So, I was dramatically under-proteined.

Here's what I think happened: A couple years ago I was strong. I cut weight and got fast. Over time my diet slipped and my body composition changed... less muscle, more fat. Operating so close to the edge of the BMI (body mass index) range leaves little room for error. I was basically forcing my body to eat its own muscles. Not good when you have very little natural musculature.

I'm now eating 6-8 scoops of GNC's whey protein a day (120-140g.) I'm also putting a lot more quality foods on board. All the fiber results in triple and quad duke outs on long runs.

In the last two weeks I've gained about 12 pounds. Which is scary for an endurance athlete. I kind of wondered what I was doing the first week as the pounds added up. But the thing that made me really pay attention was my workout this past weekend. My legs on the bike felt like they were finally strong again. I felt like I could muscle through some stuff and not fall apart. Big change.

I can see that my leg muscles are bigger. My calves are now sticking out. In just two weeks. (To be sure I'm no Kindzia, but the difference is there.)

At this point I've added some weight back onto my frame. I'm thinking 165 lbs is a good target weight but am willing to go 170 if that's where my body feels right. I'll make sure that my body composition is lean and muscular, not light and fatty.

I'm not going to cut weight for Louisville. It's too close and I'm too fresh on this nutritional rebuild. I'll race it as-is and then slowly optimize the diet to get me to a muscular 165 lbs before Florida. The goal is to keep body weight as steady as you can. But what I learned is that this is only half of the story. You also have to keep your body composition improving.

Much of this is just basic nutrition. I slipped for a while. And it took a while for it to catch up with me. In fact, the low body weight made me fast for a while. But I'm glad to be back on the path.

Oddly, if I achieve my goal of a lean 165 lbs I'll look even skinnier than I do as a fatty 162 lbs.

One realization is this: I'm not willing to trade fast for healthy. I want to be healthy first and then find a way to be fast within the limits of health.

My big theme with diet is slow change over time. It's never about next week's weigh-in or next month's race. Eating is something you do many times every day and your life depends on it. It's no place for drastic changes. Just as my fall into nutritional woes took years, I expect eating properly to be a lifelong effort. As I've made the switch to Paleo-esque eating I've often let myself eat things that're off-plan. No point setting the bar so high that I never get there.

One caveat is the notion of calorie-restriction as it relates to longevity. Restricting caloric intake is the only proven way to extend lifespan. Of course, that strategy needs to rest atop one of healthy eating. So I'll start at square one and then move towards a 150th birthday later on.

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Acceptance of Self

3 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

A concept that Paul C mentioned at lunch and Gordo blogged about has been rattling around in the (vacuous) cage upstairs. In Gordo's words:

When we find something emotionally difficult -- odds are -- the situation is bumping against personal fears and challenging our self-image. True confidence arises from acceptance of our own performance not the capacity to dominate the performances of others.

I generally agree. How I see my fitness has a dramatic effect on how I train, how much I enjoy it and how much I progress.

When I'm not very fit but I think I am I find nothing but frustration, session after session. When I'm not very fit and I know it I see small progress every day and feel like I'm slowly climbing a mountain.

When I'm super fit I rarely acknowledge it, instead concluding that I'm overtrained or that somebody spiked my coffee with EPO (thanks dudes, btw.) I never want to believe that I'm at near pinnacle of my personal fitness because of the fear that it's not the fitness of my dreams. This causes me to back off and not push to the next level which would be better yet (but of course not the fitness of my dreams.)

Clearly my own experiences validate Paul C and Gordo's thoughts... when I accept where I'm at I progress. When I don't, lines get crossed and things aren't fun.

I've also experienced the same thing in business. When I'm willing to admit that something isn't working I can change tactics and move forward. Lots of parallels here... I treat business like an athletic event.

Knowing all of this, how do I use it?

That's the tricky part, and most of what's been rattling around upstairs. Over the last few weeks I've been in a funk. So on runs I've said "you're not fit, you can slow down and build a base." And logically I've believed it.

But it didn't work... I was still miserable.

Enter, Deep Survival (because most of my life analysis stuff usually ends up there by default.) My logical self knows that I'm not fit. My numbers show it. My body feels it. I'm not fit right now.

But my emotional self is afraid that I wasted the early part of the season, that I won't have time to re-build for late season races and that with family and work I won't be able to carve out the time to train any more. I notice myself saying, just every now and then, "well, maybe I'm actually very, very, very fit and that's why my heart rate is so low today." Or, "I only missed my PR by 13 seconds just three weeks ago." Nevermind that all the numbers tell me this is not the case.

I tell myself that I suck (intellectual self) 5,000 times over the course of a run. I tell myself that maybe I'm super-fit (emotional self) once or twice.

And clearly emotional self wins. Which is exactly what Deep Survival says... emotional self is terribly powerful, can lift cars. But emotional self is rtarded and needs intellectual self to keep it in check.

My point is that simply knowing about the misalignment is just the first part of the equation. Knowing the remedy (accepting your self) is another part. And the most important part, actual acceptance, takes time. I don't really know how or why it happens but I do know that after the 100,000th time intellectual self screams "slow the F down!" emotional self will get it and my perception of self will be in alignment with my physical self.

And then my muscles will improve and I'll be out of alignment again.

Anything I can do to reduce the time it takes to get emotional self to accept reality will improve my performance, in all of my life. Gordo's strategy for this is called RASU, Relax and Soften Up. He's got some good posts up about what it means to be soft. I interpret much of this as his attempt to gain skill at accepting his own self (and help others do the same.)

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Further Reflections on the Gulf Coast Triathlon 2008

3 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Now, a little removed from the emotion of race day, I can look at the event from a more logical perspective. The race outcome wasn’t quite as bad as initially reported by our joereger.com correspondents.

1) My new training methods are working. I’m doing a lot less hours but my race time is constant. That’s more efficient training. Despite fears that I didn’t have the endurance to make it through the race, I did.

2) Even though I didn’t PR, my performance was the best yet at the half distance. Weather conditions on the swim, bike and run made this year a harder race than the last few. So coming within 13 seconds of my PR ain’t bad.

3) I didn’t blow up on the run when it got hot. The heat kicked in at the halfway point for me. It was really hot. I felt it. I felt many of the sensations that precede explosions. And while I did fade some, I was able to keep going strong to the end.

4) This is my third race that I felt I paced the run properly. IMFL06, IMFL07 and now this one. I go by feel, easier early on and then I bump it up slowly throughout. What’s interesting is that I never say “it’s time to go a little faster.” It’s more like my mental associations morph through the run from a general “keep it slow” to “time to go.” But the thoughts aren’t necessarily race or pace related. Often it’s more like “I’m being reserved” to “I’m being aggressive.” The key is that I flow into a mindset of going faster instead of trying to go faster. When I do workouts where I want to be at a pace and I say “I want to run 6:00/mi” I just get miserable because the motivation is logical but not emotional. When I do a workout listening to Metallica and just let ‘er rip I often find that I’m doing 6:00/mi with ease. So I guess I’m saying that in the Deep Survival sense I’m using my emotional side to pace my runs more than my logical side.

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Today's Plan: Half Iron

4 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

I need to do a more complete blog post on how I lost my mojo in the lead-up to St. Anthony's but suffice it to say that it was a perfect storm of work, family, babies, stress, cold weather, bodily injuries and a surprisingly small set of bad training decisions. Once I opted out of St. A's I did nothing. I'm now looking at three to four weeks of non-badass workouts. Fitness has been lost.

Whenever I'm missing my mojo I ask myself "what would make me feel like I have my mojo?" Well, in the lead-up to a half ironman race the base mojo-builder would be completing a workout at race distance.

So that's my plan for today... I'm going to swim 84 laps (1.2 miles), bike 56 miles and run 13.1 miles. Slowly, of course.

When I started joereger.com many years ago I would post expectations and use the peer pressure to get myself to do the stuff I posted about. Lately I've fallen out of that pattern, preferring to keep my goal workouts secret and just post when I'm done. Today I decided to throw some peer pressure onto the day to see what happens.

Finally some nice weather. Wish me luck.

Another random note... I need to change my workout pattern. I need to be more like the Pauls who workout before work. Up at 4:30am today, got a few hours of work done, heading to the gym. I need to switch to this pattern.

So, there, two personal goals posted.

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Prolly Pulling out of St. Anthony's

4 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Things are just too tight and busy right now with the baby and the company. I don't feel comfortable taking the time out to race. It really sucks and I feel like I'm letting people down but I've got to focus the resources we have right now. No final decision but that's where we're leaning.

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Ibuprofen and Muscle Mass

4 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Some interesting new research says that:

Taking daily recommended dosages of ibuprofen and acetaminophen caused a substantially greater increase over placebo in the amount of quadriceps muscle mass and muscle strength gained during three months of regular weight lifting, in a study by physiologists at the Human Performance Laboratory, Ball State University.

They don't know why this happens but the author seems to indicate that it's some sort of metabolic process that allows for more muscle mass. Could be. But I'd argue that reducing inflammation and thus damage between workouts is a big factor too. For years I've avoided the temptation to take ibuprofen after hard workouts because I didn't want my body to be relieved of the stress. My thinking has been that the only reason for working out is to create stress on the body so that the body responds by rebuilding itself stronger. By taking something to reduce the stress, by my thinking, you're reducing the effective training load. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm not.

A few key points: 1) Don't mess around with ibuprofen. It's not worth the liver damage people. 2) Really don't mess around with acetaminophen... it's actually one of the riskier drugs in your bathroom because the threshold between safe and very not safe is narrow and positioned close to safe. 3) The studies weren't in any way focused on endurance athletics. They were done on people aged 60-78 who are already losing a lot of muscle. We've frequently seen things that help weight lifters but hurt endurance types.

So I certainly won't be changing my ibuprofen policy. But, since ibuprofen is one of the only things that helps get rid of my migraines when I get them, maybe I'll feel a little less bad about having to take it from time to time.

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2008 St. Anthony's 30-34AG Pre-Race Participant Analysis

4 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Race organizers posted the participant list for the 2008 St. Anthony's race. Last year I managed a 4th AG so I spent a little time digging in to the participant list to see what this year's race might look like. I mean, hey, if the three ahead of me aren't racing this year I win by default, right? (Not.) My main goals with the analysis:

• determine whether anybody moved down from the Elite Amateur division into 30-34AG (nobody did)


• determine whether anybody with a time faster than mine from last year moved from 25-29AG to 30-34AG (three did)


• determine whether anybody with a time faster than mine from last year in my AG is doing the race again this year (two are)

So, given last year's performances, there are five people faster than me in the age group. Josh Shields (who didn't race last year) is beating me in training on swim, bike and run numbers so it's a safe bet that he'll be ahead of me on race day. That leaves me with a non-prediction of 7th.

Of course, this non-prediction isn't very valid. There were people close behind me last year. And there were some just ahead of me. It's a tight race and a shoe drop or bad cornering can throw you down a spot here and there. Some people will have worse races. Some will have better.

I'm training differently this year. Lots more intensity and rest which should serve me well for a shorter race like this. But who knows. Maybe the aerobic base isn't there. My swim is for crap too.

This analysis only takes into account the people that raced last year. It doesn't take into account those surprises who I know nothing about... freakin' Guatemalans. If I really wanted to get crazy with the analysis I'd pull up every person's name in the 2008 race and check all past races for them... there are surely some people who raced 2006 but not 2007, for example. But the participant list is PDF and not easily manipulated.

Here's what I did: I basically threw last year's results from EliteAm, 25-29AG and 30-34AG into spreadsheet tabs. I removed those aging up to 35-39 and those too young to be in 30-34 this year. I then combined them into one list and sorted by overall time. From there I manually searched the 2008 participants list for each name to figure out where they're racing this year in the 30-34 AG. Some aren't racing and some are in EliteAm. That boiled it down to a fairly short list. I've attached the spreadsheet to this post. If you check it out, don't forget the tabs on the bottom of the spreadsheet to see all the data.

Another way I could get mega-crazy about prep is to get race numbers for the top ten known competitors and memorize them. Even more extreme, I could memorize the race numbers and their key strength. So, for example, I'd know that number 453 is a strong runner so I need to be ahead of or with him off the bike.

But that's all a bit extreme. I spent about 20 minutes to get a sense of what the field holds. It'll be more competitive this year. I think this is all the prep I need. And really, I have my best races by going into my personal space and causing myself a lot of pain. What 453's doing is likely just a distraction.

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Two GooseEggs

5 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

My second GooseEgg of the week today. Self-imposed. My body is just a little over the edge right now and I'm slipping back into my old habit of overtraining. So, oddly, I have to break a new habit to prevent myself from falling back into an old habit. I really want to try this new investing in resting (tm) approach to see how it pans out. At this point in the game I can't change course for St. Anthony's or Gulf Coast. Not enough time to ramp up a huge base. It's hard and somehow Josh knew I was struggling to rest because he did 15 miles solid. Nice workout Josh... it's great to see his fitness coming together this year. He was kicking butt last year on 6-7 hrs of training/week. Now he's bumped that up to 11 hrs. I'm coming from the opposite end of the spectrum. Must. Stick. To. Plan. Longish ride tomorrow with Marc and Dana. After that I may leg-Goose (swim-only day) and then see if the bod's recovered. I may turn next week into a recovery week.

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Intensity and Base

5 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Michael Bennett, a.k.a. Big Unit, emailed to ask about the interval stuff I did yesterday. His general question was along the lines of "why're you doing that?" He said that he's done interval work in the past and is trying to figure out how to integrate it into the future. In the process of replying to him I realized that I had written a blog post... so here you go:

When I do nothing but base training I find that my performance at base pace improves dramatically. For an 8:00min/mi run pace I’ll see my heart rate stay very low… and I can maintain it forever. Which is good. But I find that then just moving to 7:30min/mi shoots my heart rate off the charts. In other words, I’m optimized for that one base pace and have a very small pace window to operate within.

By adding intervals I’ve expanded my pace window. I can move from 8:00min/mi to 7:00min/mi without a dramatic heart rate increase. And I can even operate at 6:00min/mi comfortably for short periods of time.

The cost for this bigger window seems to be in endurance. I’m not as optimized for 8:00min/mi so I can’t hold it forever. If I were to run a few miles at 8:00min/mi now I’m guessing my heart rate would be lower than when I was optimized for base pace. But, and this is a big but, if I were to run many, many miles at that pace I’d see my performance degrade near the end because I don’t have that endurance.

In my first couple years at tri I focused on base pace. Then I got into some ultrarunning last year, assuming that it’d make me a faster runner. It slowed me down. Because I was optimizing myself for an even slower pace on 50 milers and 100 milers (training 50k’s and marathons were done at closer to 9:00min/mi). So this year I’m letting the pendulum swing back a bit.

I’ve found that interval training takes a while to really take hold. I feel some immediate benefits after a couple weeks (less pain on hard exertions). But I don't really see improvements that translate to racing for a little while longer. I started more intense stuff at the end of last season and started to feel benefits in early February. I don’t think that you need much intensity to see benefits. One intense run per week… or some intervals near the end of a run. And the same on the bike.

Base should always be, well, the base of your workout plan. Low intensity aerobic work gives you an engine. Interval training gives you the gears to use that engine. In the last couple years I believe I had focused too much on the engine, to the detriment of the gears. This year I'm a lot more open to high intensity work. In the past I saw anything over 150bpm as the devil's work... destroying my entire season.

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Cycling Cadence and Subsequent Run Performance

5 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Joe Friel posted a research summary of cycling cadence as it relates to run performance. Great topic. In it he notes a new study (2005) that contradicts the "standard knowledge" from a study in 2002. The recent study argues for higher cadence... the other one argues for high cadence. The recent study only had cyclists change their cadence for the last ten minutes of the workout.

Patrick Dowd of All3Sports gave me my first data point in the cadence discussion before St. Anthony's 2004. That's when I drove the bikes into the garage and had to get a new one on short order. He was setting up my fit and told me that I needed to spin a high cadence to protect my run legs. Given the only available study at the time this was the correct answer. Since then I've always worked to increase my cadence.

I still favor the older study because it had the athletes use the variable cadence for the entire duration of their workout. And because it makes sense to me that if you're hammering your muscle fibers you'll do more damage than spinning it out. A car with high rpm has low latency because it doesn't need to add as much power to each stroke to increase acceleration. Same on the bike.

But it does raise the question, should I lower my cadence for a few minutes at the end of the bike? I'll play with it in training, see how it goes.

Not that this is relevant to my roadie friends... they're sipping mai tais while we triathletes are out running... oh, yeah... it's on!

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Gearage: Garmin Forerunner 305, Polars and WKO+

5 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

I liked the Garmin Forerunner 305 when I bought it as the predecessor to my Garmin Forerunner 301. It's a wrist-based GPS unit that has a nice screen and a lot of features. But when I started to do my 3 mi @ 150bpm benchmark run I found what I thought was a massive downside... the heart rate display was about three pixels tall and almost impossible to see when running.

So I generally shelved the unit and bought Polar's RS800G3, their first GPS unit. I've been a big fan of Polar for a long time. I've got years of data in my polar database... literally, four years worth of workouts. I have an S720i, an S625X, an AXN500 and an RS800G3. For race day I wear the S625X and put the S720i onto the bike so that I always have quick and easy access to my heart rate. For recent training I used the RS800G3. For swimming and random adventures I wore the AXN500.

But here's the thing about Polar: when it comes to heart rate monitors they rock but when it comes to everything else they are horrible. I sent my Polar Power Meter back to them three or four times and eventually just gave up, never trusting the data that it fed me. The RS800G3 does have a GPS unit but it is mounted on the armband and either has trouble communicating with the wrist unit or the reception software has poor smoothing. After months of playing with it I can say that I rarely trusted the pace information it was giving me.

And for the first time with the RS800G3, Polar really sucked with heart rate. They moved to a new radio technology for communication between the chest strap and the wrist unit called Wear Link Wind. Oh, they broke wind alright. Half the time it doesn't pick up my heart rate. It doesn't work under water. Interference from my headphones blocks the signal. Fuggeddaboutit.

I had already put the RS800G3 and AXN500 onto eBay when I started fiddling with the Garmin Forerunner 305 tonight. Much to my amazement, I realized that I could program three screens worth of display and I could choose heart rate, making it big and readable! Nice! So I set up my first screen with realtime data. Second screen with lap data. Third screen with average data. Beautiful.

Now I feel like I can leverage the excellent features of the Garmin. I've used training partner a few times and as I ramp up for races I'm planning on racing against myself week-to-week more often.

The Garmin Forerunner 305 is back on top! (The exclamation imparts a little too much excitement... but the period is a little too laid back. I figured I'd go with the exclamation and just let you assume that I'm really so dorky as to be that psyched about wrist-top screen data management.)

One of my big issues is having a single repository to store everything. To date I've relied on Polar's ProTrainer 5. Not bad. But I have a lot of devices, some not Polar. I've tried to switch to WKO+ a few times but I don't really like the workflow to download workouts. It's different between devices. Annotation is difficult to accomplish. And more often than not it won't read my Polars or Garmins directly... meaning that I end up using the native software to download to the computer and then I have to manually move it into WKO+.

They could make things easier by having a feature that prevents me from adding two of the same workout. With that I could just drag a whole folder over there and let it figure which stuff is new.

The other thing they need to do is get better about respecting the workout type from the device... Run or Bike. I often find that run workouts are logged as bike and vice versa.

Some of this is user error... I've never spent the time to really, really, really get to know WKO+. But I don't really feel I should have to. When I'm hot, sweaty and sugar-depleted I want a big honking "Download" button to take care of things for me. Polar's better about this, but not great. And Garmin's pretty darn good... plug in the device and it sucks in the new stuff.

As always, none of these devices or software packages does it all. Each has certain strengths and weaknesses. Marc's struggling to make sense of the power/gps/heart rate world. With all of the options he can get close but can't seem to make everything fit.

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On the Clock: Workout Style

5 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

This is an idea I've had for a while now. I spend a lot of time at a computer and on the phone. Ergonomics experts say that you should take frequent breaks. So here's the plan. I have a kitchen timer set to count down from 20 minutes. When it goes off I do one minute of exercise and then restart the countdown.

I'm rotating between three exercises: situps, pushups and squats. I'd like to get a pullup bar in the office for my swimming lats. And I may add some calf raises. While this whole thing sounds incredibly easy I've already learned that just one set an hour of each exercise adds up over the course of a morning. I'm doing 30 situps (with twists), 25 pushups and 40-50 squats. First few hours were a breeze. But now I'm feeling some burn. Interesting.

My plan is to make it a habitual behavior to turn on the timer any time I'm at the computer. Given that on non-meeting days I'll spend fourteen or more hours there this could mean some good strength. Let's just say it's an eight hour work day. That's 24 minutes of strength workout hidden throughout the day. Or eight sets of each exercise, 24 sets total.

I may fiddle with the time. I like the once-per-hour synchrony of having three exercises and three sets per hour. So if I move to four exercises I may bump the time down to 15 minutes. I don't want it to distract me too much from work though. There will be limits, of course.

The goal is to build up my strength component. I'm just finding it hard with my time constraints to get specific strength workouts in. No P90X in months. No pilates in months. No plyometrics in months. My hope is that by combining it with my daily process I can get the strength component and improve work efficiency.

The kitchen timer requires me to restart the countdown each time. As do four of my workout watches. What's up with that? I remember my $10 Casio from 1984 had a repeating countdown timer.

I'll let you know how it progresses. You already know that Heather thinks. As she walked through she heard the beep, saw me doing a set of pushups and said "what the heck?"

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Goose Egg

6 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

I goose egged on the Streaking Challenge last night. I made it close to mid-Feb though. That's a good thing. Just too busy with, well, everything. The Flagged For Response list is over 20. By the time the sun set I was just in no mood to get a workout in. Not nearly as good an excuse as Paul had for his first goose egg. It is what it is.

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VO2Max Test: 68.6Run / 63.3Bike

6 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Today Marc and I headed to The Sport Factory where Matt hurt us. I mean, he tested our VO2Maxs.

The results really surprised me. I weigh about ten pounds more than I did when I got tested three months ago. That's a decent handicap in terms of VO2Max which includes a body weight component. On top of that my consistency has been fairly poor. While I've fulfilled 30 min/day, many of those days were weak efforts. I expected my number to drop and was really more interested in my AeT and AT.

But my numbers rose on both the run and on the bike. So my new motto in life is "expect less, get more." I plan on working out less than 12 minutes per day from here on out.

Run VO2Max: 68.6 ml O2/kg/min
Bike VO2Max: 63.3 ml O2/kg/min

These are clearly the result of more anaerobic and interval work. When I've actually made it to workouts, I've gone hard so far this year. Let's not talk about when I haven't made it.

If you're not into the numbers this is a good time to check out.

Run:
AeT dropped from 40.6@165bpm to 41.9@163bpm
AT rose from 52.9@180bpm to 61.9@186bpm
Peak rose from 60.9@193bpm to 68.6@196bpm

Again, these numbers demonstrate that I've lost some overall aerobic fitness but gained in my anaerobic zones. I can go faster over shorter distances. Over the season my hope is to retain some of that speed while re-building the aerobic side of things. Matt talked to me a good bit about maintenance work on the endurance I still do have.

Bike:
AeT rose from 41.9@159bpm to 43.6@172bpm
AT dropped slightly from 54.9@179bpm to 54@182bpm
Peak rose from 59.7@184bpm to 63.3@191bpm

The AeT heart rate seems questionable to me since it's changed so much... I mean, I can't hold 172bpm for a six hour ride. I can do 159bpm(the previous reading) but then I can't run. If I want to run I need to be around 140bpm. The drop in AT is small and so generally speaking my AT is about what it was before. What changed here is my top-end.

Interesting numbers. The first time they've jumped like this. And it makes sense. I've been changing the way I train.

Marc was in for his first VO2 session. He had fun with the face mask but adapted quickly. He turned solid numbers which illustrate why we're good training partners. And, as expected, he was up at 199bpm.

Quote of the day: "something smells."

One big takeaway for both Marc and me is that our top-end heart rate zones are a good bit higher than expected. We've got to get the old ticker bouncing to get the right workouts in to progress.

Good benchmarking. Thanks to Matt for administering the tests and for talking us through the numbers. Onward.

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Still Streaking

7 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

I'm still streaking per Paul Kindzia's Streaking Challenge. At least 30 minutes of workout per day since the beginning of the year. Those of you with web browsers (??) may have noticed that my calendar has a number of days with no logged workout. On some days I combine a P90X workout with ten minutes of biking and a quick treadmill run. It's ugly. I'm in my underwear. And I don't feel like logging ten minutes here and there. But it gets the job done... the heart rate up... the blood moved. Streaking is a good thing.

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Quality vs. Quantity

7 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

For the last couple seasons I subscribed to the base fitness plus volume training plan. Late last season I started to see some holes in that plan as I had massive aerobic capacity but little musculature or anaerobic capability.

Near the end of last season, in the off-season and so far early this season I've worked hard to create workouts that accomplish something. In doing so I'm shifting my focus away from simple aerobic volume.

A few observations about the shift.

I feel like I can enjoy working out more. Not that I wasn't enjoying the base training. But base training takes restraint. Well, that's not really the issue though... quality training takes equal restraint.

What am I reaching for here?

With base training I always felt like high heart rates were evil and took away from aerobic growth and future performance. I felt guilty every time I got near 150bpm (oh, I had a poor interpretation of base training, btw). So workouts for literally two years either felt like I was riding slow to avoid the heart rate overlord, or they felt like I was breaking all the rules by enjoying a little heart rate.

This year I'm way, way, way less worried about my heart rate. I watch it. I choose target zones. I balance low hr stuff with high. But I don't feel guilty when I'm really working hard. And this is huge. It's really allowed me to enjoy workouts more.

There's a lot of validity to the aerobic-only approach. I feel that it served me well for those three years I used it (two very seriously). But something on the macro-macro scale of my body changed and it's time to get back to some more specific training. Time to enjoy the fuller spectrum of heart rates.

There's probably some risk that I won't build up as strong an aerobic base as I did last year. But last year I ran 26 hours straight. Ironman is only 10 to 11 hours (hopefully). My run endurance is already at full distance. My bike could be with a few more rides per month. And my swim is, well, for crap.

The point is that I'm willing to trade some aerobic fitness for some other fitness that I now believe is my limiter.

I've embraced the CompuTrainer. It shortens the clock time required to get a solid bike workout in. I look back now and I honestly don't think I pedaled at all for most of last year. I think I was probably outputting 140 watts for almost all of my spring and summer cycling. Horrible. The CompuTrainer allows me to cram some serious workout into a short period of time.

More treadmill work will keep the leg turnover with me.

And more holistic training will give me core strength. Heck, I may even get a bicep muscle one of these days.

I'm surprised at the amount of fitness I've got compared to the number of hours I've been investing lately. But by focusing on quality I've maintained and maybe even moved forward a bit. Now as I start to add some volume... or more accurately stated, do more hours of quality work... I suspect that my fitness will progress.

Still a long way to go to St. Anthony's. I'm not nearly as fit as I was last year for that race. And the peaking process is not a science. But I'm feeling good for this point of the year.

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Active-Spokes

7 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Interesting new wheel concept discussed by Joe Friel on his blog. Friel mentions flat courses but I’d think you’d gain the most on rolling courses with a lot of up/down switches. I’ve emailed the owner of the company to see if the things work on Ksyrium spokes (which I have)… but it doesn’t look like they will based on the pics. 2-5% is a decent return… race wheels and an aero helmet can’t guarantee that... I don't think. I can’t wait to hear the vibrations on these things though... could get very annoying. Of course, it wouldn't work for me on race day as I have a disc and 3-spoke carbon front wheel. So gaining efficiency in training and then losing it for the race isn't really part of the plan. Maybe some day Hed/Zipp will add a concept like this to their products. Or maybe the governing bodies will ban the concept of active wheels. Who knows. Interesting though.

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Intensity and Endurance Balance

7 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Marc sent me an article on active.com about how recent research affects the standard notion of a base period for endurance athletes. Good read. And then Kindzia posts some nice behind the scenes details between he and his coach Matt Russ. Matt's throwing him some intensity now, during the traditional base period of the year. Dana keeps getting faster and she can't keep her heart under 210bpm (just kidding Dana). I've noted that this year I need more intensity and speedwork to avoid last year's "I'm fit but I'm slow" pitfall. Sounds like a trend here. So I told Marc I'll take it to the logical conclusion and do Ironman on just ten minutes of super-hard interval training every day. Yeah, that'll work. And just imagine the free time I'll have!

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Kindzia's Consistency Challenge

7 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Paul Kindzia called me out for the Consistency Challenge 2008. He's already got six people who've agreed to do 1 hour of workout each day from now until eternity. I think it's a great idea and I'll throw my name in the hat. Luckily I worked out yesterday. And even though it was only 40 min, Kindzia's willing to give a day or two grace period and is considering reducing the competition to 30 min/day. I'll go ahead and predict that I won't win this thing... with work, family and germs I suspect that something'll jump in the way soon. Oh, and with SufferFest this weekend I'm thinking that next Monday may be a nice day for me to exit the competition. We'll see. Consistency is something that I worked on last year. Specifically I worked to get more quality into basic every day workouts. Just getting to the workout is obviously important. Thanks to Kindzia for encouraging this sort of behavior!

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How to Measure/Benchmark Recovery?

8 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Everybody knows that recovery is critical to athletic progress. Some actually credit a genetic propensity for recovery as the main ingredient that makes athletes continue to progress to extremely great levels.

Blair shot me an email today that got me thinking. How can we measure or benchmark recovery? With a workout it's simple... heart rate, wattage, speed, etc... we have many metrics to choose from. But recovery?

Recovery is the act of muscular rebuilding. Fixing all of those microtears and in the process making muscles just a little bit stronger than last time.

I suppose we could use resting heart rate. And Polar has an Own Index that's supposed to tell you whether you're recovered or not (but I've found it flaky).

The reason for the question is this... how do we evaluate products like Endurox, Boost, etc that claim to help us with recovery? And how do we nail down our post-workout recovery plan? How much protein, carbs, fluids, stretching, sleep, etc?

There are plenty of guidelines but not many processes to help you uncover your optimal recovery plan. And if it's so important to recover maybe we should start looking for ways to do this.

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Swim Form, Videos of Thorpedo

8 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

Dylan added some thoughts on swim form including some local athlete tips. Good stuff. He also mentioned some videos of Ian Thorpe swimming. I found a bunch on YouTube and checked them out. The elbows are definitely high and wide, something I need to work on. But more than any single tweak to my stroke I think that I need to just watch these videos for a long time to internalize a good stroke.

It's like basketball. The U.S. generally dominates in basketball. Why is this? Probably because kids play it from a young age. But also because we inundate them with images of great players that they can mimic. In soccer I remember players watching the World Cup and then trying out signature moves. The ability to mimic is important.

They've done studies (actually, I don't know who they are or what their method was) where two groups of roughly equal non-basketball players were matched up against one another. One group got a week of hands-on training with basketball coaches. The other group never touched a basketball but watched videos of great players and talked about basketball. When they competed the players who just watched the sport won. Power of the mind. I have no idea as to the source of validity of this research though.

But I think I'll watch some Thorpedo vids to bask in the great form. Thanks for the idea Dylan!

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Emerging SufferFest 08 Details

8 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

The SufferFest08 Facebook Group is now up and running. Here's the scoop:

SufferFest 08 is a multi-day cycling event based out of Atlanta, GA. We pick four days and ride between 70 and 100 miles each day. Each ride is different. The goal of the rides is to build our aerobic bases for the season. While accelerations aren't out of the question, the general plan is to ride at a comfortable pace for a long period of time, thus inducing suffering... which is in turn converted to a festival via cursing and bad jokes.

This year's event is taking place Jan 3rd - Jan 6th.

Day 1 - Rolling - Coopermine/Taylorsville loop 110 miles
Day 2 - Mountains - Ellijay (profile looks like good climbing but not epic) 90 miles
Day 3 - Flat - (kellytown or serrano or sixflags) - 90-100 miles
Day 4 - Rolling - Cartersville/Budwiser or equivalent - 65 or 100 miles

We usually meet up in the morning for some bagels at Panera Bread Co, go riding and then eat sinful food afterwards.

The founders of SufferFest are Marc Crouch, Matthew Crouch, Dana Martin and Joe Reger. But you can't sue any of them. SufferFest is not an official event. It's off the grid.

The first rule of SufferFest: you will suffer.

The second rule of SufferFest: you are an army of one... bring maps, food, money and your teddy bear... if you get dropped you're on your own.

The third rule of SufferFest: nothing is politically incorrect... f-bombs will be dropped, religions will be taunted and you will be called an rtard... get over it or stay home.

The fourth rule of SufferFest: your significant others will be pissed off by the halfway point.

For a taste of last year's SufferFest check out:
http://www.joereger.com/entry-eventid5639.log

We'll use this group to plan SufferFest 08... and to mock you.

And there's also a discussion board/wall to discuss other stuff. Hop on in and help us plan this thing out. We've got the dates and basic routes picked but there are still plenty of details to finalize.

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Offseason Swimming

8 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

I forgot one tidbit of thought from yesterday's group trail run (Paul Kindzia's take on the workout, btw). Kindzia was asking somebody what they've been up to lately. The response was something like "some running, some biking and a little swimming." I think a few others nodded in agreement.

And that's certainly been my tendency in the past. To skip my weakest discipline, swimming, in the offseason. Last year I pushed through on the swim though and wasn't as disappointed as I have been with my swim in previous years. Before that I always stopped swimming and had to fight hard to get back some form.

Which gets me thinking about progress and the offseason. What if I kicked it into high swimming gear one winter. Full-on pool mileage every week. In theory this could produce solid returns because I have so much more room to improve in swimming than I do in the other two.

There are always divergent views on how much to invest in swimming for both good swimmers and poor swimmers. But Dan Empfield makes The Case for Swimming over on slowtwitch.com.

He makes two main points about swimming... here's the first:

The primary reason triathletes ought to pay a lot more attention to the swim is that it's free speed. Because it's a technique-based sport when you make that drop in time from 27min to 24min over a 1.5k swim, there is no metabolic cost associated with the increased speed.

This makes sense... the form is important. Good swimmers learn to swim at an early age and then hone their craft over the course of many, many years. We bad swimmers are making it more difficult to train muscle memory by forgetting every offseason. Here's Dan's second point

Yes, the run takes more time than the swim, so on paper there's more room to hack some time off of the run than off his time in the water. But how much work would it take for him to get from 40 minutes to 37 minutes over a 10k run? An extra 20 miles per week, or 25 miles maybe?
...
Okay, let's say he takes it out of his bike ride instead, and drops his 40k split from 1:06 to 1:03. How much time is that going to take? ... Yes, perhaps an extra 2 to 3 hours per week running, or 3 to 5 hours on the bike, might get this athlete the extra 3 minutes he'd otherwise get in the water. But remember, this is already a very good athlete, so are these 4 minutes really available to him in his land-based sports? Has he already bumped up against a pretty significant wall? And if he increases his mileage on the bike or the run, will something else suffer?

So Dan's asking the question "where should we invest our time?" here. He's saying, "ok, we've got 20 training hours a week to play with, where do we spend those hours to maximally reduce our next race time?" (my words, quoting as I was Dan.)

And that's a pretty important question. Dan concludes that:

Investing this time in the swim instead actually turns out to be quite economical. Let's say that this typical top age-grouper swims about 6000 yards per week (3 workouts of 2000 yards). Were he to double this yardage, it would cost him an extra 2 hours per week, and this is about what it would take to get him this 3 to 10 minutes he needs, depending on the distance raced.

This season won't be the season where I test this whole theory out. With the cold/flu thing I'm already behind the eight ball. But Dan's theory does seem to make sense to me. My swim time is always way below my other two which argues that aerobically I'm able to handle a faster swim but my form gets in the way.

Always interesting to winter-quarterback the season via logical argument!

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Genetic Talent vs. Hard Work

8 Months Ago | Posted to: Training Thoughts

[I typed the below in an email back to Paul Kindzia. He was discussing the notion of genetic talent vs. hard work. He clearly believes strongly in hard work while his coach Matt Russ of The Sport Factory fame describes the fact that there is such a thing as raw talent. I jumped in and responded with the message below.]

[Oh, and my desire to share tonight is motivated by Amanda Lovato who blog-taught me the word sharding in her Ironman Florida race report and then followed up a few days later by revealing to the world that during the race her lady bits were flying out of her suit... blogs are awesome. For the record, I passed Amanda during one of her rough spots, checked out her t