Training. Simplified.

Continuing the theme from last time...

"Training" Plot

This blog is on my current reading list:

http://thisisindexed.com/

and it inspired me to take one of her insightful plots of a week or so ago and slide it into a bike/triathlon racing context:



The concept of the "indexed" blog is brilliant...really helpful for developing conceptual/relational thinking.

IronMan Preparation

Let me first start this little blurb with what I want out of the exercise of sharing a few electrons all over the interwebs:

1) express myself
2) stimulate some deeper thinking about IM preparation

This is a long one, so buckle up...

FWIW, I had a couple goals for my IM experience last year:

1) explore the limits of my own capacity to "suffer" during the last half of the marathon
2) learn from the whole deal

Anyway, drafting off my last blog entry, if I were to ask myself the question "what would you do differently about your IM preparation if you had to do it again"? How would I answer that?

I read somewhere that people like short bulleted lists - cuz that makes it easier to remember things and all. Well, here's a bulleted list that summarizes how I would answer that question above:

* shorten the "fill the right" preparation period -> probably down to 8 wks or so from 14

* shorter runs with higher frequency -> maybe 3 one-hour runs rather than one long run and a couple thirty minute jobbers

I don’t really know if the way I went about things is typical or not. If I had to guess, I'd say it's not super typical... And, I reckon it's more towards the "new school" approach side of things than it is towards the "old school" approach of IM preparation. i.e -> I spent maybe 10 hours a week training for this - and incorporated some goin' hard/intensity during that time.

But that is neither here nor there...

From a more global perspective, I'd characterize my prep as two to three years of "raising the left" by doing 20 MP and above focused efforts followed by about 14 weeks of "filling the right".

Huh?

Yeah, that's a long way of saying that I spent a lot of time goin' hard, and a little bit of time making sure I figured out how to meet the KJ demands of the effort. In the end, as noted above, the KJ demand/burn rate adaption deal took way less time than I planned for to meet/figure out.

Flexibility

My initial plan was very detailed. I wrote it all out and made a sweet, neat looking excel calendar - y'know, it probably looked like one of those canned training plans an interwebs coach might dole out...

Workouts were planned for the final 14 wks leading up to the event...but yeah, that plan didn't work out - If I stop and really consider the kind of person I am - I reckon I'm not really a big "plan" guy... There's just too many distracting details and whatnot. The way the whole "plan" thing that I put together actually worked out is a pretty interesting look into some of my internal workings. I mean, there is a definite part of me that wants to be able to control thangs and then just execute when necessary. There's another, probably overriding, part of me that is completely comfortable goin' with the flow, and taking things day by day.

When it came to the IM preparation, in the end, it was a global plan that was put into place with a lot of day-to-day flexibility. I never trained "fatigued" - if it felt like I needed an extra day of rest...well, then, I took it. That carries over into my general bike racing training as well - if I'm tired, I rest. Ride Hard. Rest Hard. That's my deal.

I had a pretty simple set of goals on a weekly basis -> one long run, one long bike, swim technique development, and one day of "raising the left" via a "classic vo2" bike ride.

That was it. Pretty simple.

Here's how things kinda went on a weekly basis, with a couple deviations when necessary:

Mon: complete rest

Tue: AM swim for 45 minutes doing drills. Noon hour vo2 bike workout 60 minutes

Wed: run 30-45 minutes

Thurs: swim for 45 minutes doing drills

Friday: complete rest

Sat: "fill the right" bike ride (3200kj in as little time as necessary -> about four hours) followed up by a 30 minute "run". This bike ride was pressure on the pedals, drillin' it for the duration. Hardest workout of the week by far!

Sun: EZ bike ride with no real KJ goals for 1:45; followed by a long run that progressed to 14 miles or around 2 hours

I had estimated that the IM bike ride would take me ~3200KJ to complete, so I targetted that KJ level in my "long" Saturday rides. Though, I frickin' drilled it to burn that 3200KJ in my training. Interesting to note that it only took me about 3-4 rides to go from doing 1600 KJ rides at a nearly maximal pace to routinely hitting 3200KJ at a nearly maximal pace - these rides topped out at around 4 hours or so. Here's an example of one of those 3200KJ rides that were the cornerstone of my bike ridin':



About 5 weeks out I tried my hand at going "long" as some folks like to say:

October 11

During this effort, I'd get up and swim for an hour continuosly, go home and eat a bit...then ride at what I figured would be my IM bike watt pace for 100 miles, followed up with an hour run.

In the last three weeks or so, These style of days were mental slogs, but they did give me some confidence and allowed me to figure out how to fuel things.

November 1 was my second "long" day.

And this effort really drilled into me what things might feel like if it was a stinkin' hot/windy day, and I forced too much of my chosen fuel down during the bike ride. That was a really good learning day for me. I spent that hour run after the ride feelin' bloated and pretty crappy - too much crap sloshin' around in the ol' belly...lesson learned - if it's stinkin' hot, pull back on the reigns a bit and relax...

Another of the deviations from the general week schedule outlined above include my issues with the running aspect. I'm not a runner - never really ran long distances at any point in my endurance sport career - though, I'm pretty sure I ruined my knees while playing lots of youth basketball (I can remember being a "gym rat" during the fall/winter time playing pick-up games all day long for the better part of my youth)...and those basketball knees have always been my limiter when running "longer" distances, it seems.

I really did try and plan for this...I actually started preparing for the run sometime in July or thereabouts... I progressed over a three-four week period starting at around a 30 minute EZ jog for my long run of the week and building it up 10 minutes a week. Well, like an idiot, I felt really good on one of those days and figured I'd see how fast I could run that last 15 minutes of a 45 minute run. I went pretty fast for me - laying down a sub 6 minute mile for the last little bit...I kinda felt a bit of a twinge in my knees when I was doing it, and sure enough, the next time I tried to run, I couldn't make it more than 5 minutes before the pain in my knees was too intense to continue.

Well, yeah, that was a pretty stupid thing to do in hindsight...and, as it turned out, I could not run for a couple weeks...and then I followed that up with walking 2-3 times a week for 20 minutes at a time for a few weeks... that put me into late august or so before I was able to "run" again without pain. I worked back into things and was able to string together five days of 30-45 minute runs with family up in p-town - which was a great way to kick the last 14-ish weeks of preparation off!

My long run progressed well up until the end of september, where I completed a long run of around 13.5 miles... but, I could feel my knees barkin' the last 20 minutes of that sucker, and it pretty much freaked me out...so I went with the flow, and tweaked things a bit.

How'd I tweak things? Well, I cut back my long run to 1:30, and then in late October, early November, I started doing multiple one-hour runs during the week -> i.e, I upped my frequency in order to make up/compensate for my fear of not getting in a longer run.

So, yeah, if I were to do it again, I'd forego the long run for quite awhile, and do more frequent shorter runs of 1-1.5 hours. That might have saved my knees for race day...then again, maybe not!

Taper?

I'm not a real big believer in this kind of deal when it comes to long duration events such as an IM. A two week long "taper" - where one actually tapers off their KJ expenditure might be good for shedding some prolonged, avoidable, unecessary fatigue though...but, since how I approached things never really left me carrying loads of physical fatigue, well, there's no real point in doing a long confusing tapering off of KJ's. I just made sure my legs felt good on the big day!

This approach, and respecting how my body was reacting to things, is why I kept the KJ train rolling all the way up to the long day I laid down 8 days out from IMAZ:



Y'know, honestly, I wonder how fast all those guys who carry six weeks+ of serious, significant, fatigue and then taper off their KJ's in the two weeks prior to their IM effort might go if they tried a different approach? Maybe one day, we'll find out, eh?

Lightin' it up

Here's what I did four days out from the effort (after fully recovering from the 8 day out big KJ day):



Yeah, I lit it up pretty good in the week preceding IMAZ. Above shows multiple efforts at 2+ times what I was going to target for an IM power target - sometimes, crazy physiological/hormonal things can happen when you lay into a series of crazy high intensity efforts on the bike just before a big event. I recovered from this sucker really quickly, FWIW. Did it help? Well, maybe, but it sure didn’t seem to hurt things.

There are some other nuggets I haven't mentioned above, that you might be interested in reading about...

Did you know that I rode my TT bike less than 6 times during the 14 weeks I was focusing on IMAZ? Yeah, I did the bulk of my riding on my road bike... the three long days described above were on the TT bike, and a couple more rides in the last week (including the shakedown spin up the beeline hwy on the day prior to IMAZ) were on the TT bike. That's it.

I targetted 170W for my IM bike power and rode to an official 5:16:xx split including 3 honey-bucket stops. This watt level was roughly 55% of my 20MP at the time. Here were my SRM time and watt splits for each of the three laps of the bike course:

Lap 1: 1:42:33 @ 170W
Lap 2: 1:43:19 @ 172W
Lap 3: 1:43:35 @ 168W

I was well within myself, there, eh? ;-)

I took down about 1100 calories +/- during the bike ride -> which was about 200 calories per hour.

I swam a 1:24:xx - which was way faster than I had done for the full distance 10 days out while swimming in a pool without a wetsuit.

I "ran" the first half of the marathon at just over a 9 minute/mile pace - which was my targetted run pace.

I walked 8 miles of the marathon, cuz my body broke... :-(

I waddled across the line in 11 hours and 35 minutes.

I didn't bonk.

I didn't "suffer" like I wanted to "suffer", and thus, felt like I "failed" to achieve one of my IM experience goals.

I don't know if I'll do that whole deal again! :-o

Hey, I don't think there's any rocket science here in my approach, or any approach that you'll read about out there. I raised the left for a really long time (2-3 years), then astoundingly quickly filled the right. Then, on race day I "run what I brung" so to speak. Though, as I mentioned in that neat bulleted list up above, I think I would tweak a few things if had to do it over again:

* shorten the "fill the right" preparation period -> probably down to 6-8 wks or so from 14 wks

* shorter runs with higher frequency -> maybe 3 one-hour runs per week rather than one long run and a couple thirty minute jobbers.

Eager to hear how you prepared for your IM,

-k

Kloden and LANCE

I was watchin' the tour coverage this morning as events transpired...it was pretty amazing to see Kloden and LANCE, two, what I perceived as, bitter rivals of the past - remember stg 17 of the 2004 TdF:



Anyway, to see these guys "teaming up"...well, that's a bit strong, I reckon...I mean, one of them was working on a salary basis setting tempo for the other who was dropped, and limiting losses...the LANCE, well, let's just say it's a safe bet that he's probably betting on something longer term, financially, than this year's efforts, with a higher ROI than the UCI minimum salary, eh?

Anyway, pretty crazy to see how someone who allegedly/is accused of taking on blood transfusions three years ago:

http://autobus.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=news/2009/may09/may13news3

stacked up against LANCE on the alpe d'huez four years ago:

http://www.biketechreview.com/performance/la_cant_doit.htm

and more specifically this chart within the linked article above:



Which estimates (hey, that's an estimate, lawyer guys, eh?) LANCE at 6.4 w/kg and kloden at 6.0 w/kg. The NEW LANCE is going better than he was during two of his 7 previous victories, according to pre-tour interviews, though? As Trek likes to say during their tour de france versus coverage: "WOW"...

both of these guys (Kloden and Armstrong) are getting a bit long in the tooth (kloden is 34 while the NEW LANCE is 37 - which is, hey, the same age as yours truly - so I guess I know a thing or two about how performance at 37 rates against performance 3-4 years ago...or heck, 10 years ago for that matter...), but, how today's events transpired became a bit of a head scratcher for me, given all of that previous data/information... Though, now that I think about it a bit, well, I'm pretty sure Kate Hudson is what is behind it all for the NEW LANCE's performance:



Bring on the new generation of bike racing and bike racers - can't wait to see how things shape up 10 years from now!

Bring it!

2004 vs 2008

Position on the right has probably 20cm of drop, while the position on the left has maybe 8-10cm of drop and is the one I used for the Ironman effort of a month ago. Guess which one is more comfortable, more powerful, more aerodynamic, and ultimately faster! ;-)



Current training has been a mixed bag, though - it's been awhile since I've done my mainstay 20MP effort up Couser canyon, and man, it sure did feel like crap doing that climb this past weekend!

A long way to go before I'm feeling ready to toe the line against all the socal pro masters...

Science Fiction, Serendipity, and Git'n 'r dun

Continuing on the science fiction theme from last week, I had the opportunity to use "the force" this weekend in what was my last planned "long day" prior to Ironman Arizona in a few weeks. The force? WTF?

Let me explain...

Yeah, well, last monday, I sent the ol' SRM pro in to get the battery swapped out in the powercontrol, as it would no longer hold a charge reliably. I reckoned I'd sweet talk the folks at SRM-USA into a quick turnaround, but alas, it didn't work out quite like that. I 1-day aired the unit on Monday, and the folks at SRM didn't get it shipped out until Friday - so, I'll have the power meter by tomorrow, it seems.

Anyway, I had this long day planned, and was kind of counting on having the PM data for a little feedback for the supercomputer. I'll admit that I did consider postponing the effort/day until mid next week (and taking a day off work!), until I realized the opportunity I had been presented.

Opportunity?

Yeah, the opportunity to build some more robustness into the ol' supercomputer for race day and beyond! I did my 7 hour-ish (split up a wee-bit) effort completely by feel - I used "the force" ;-) so to speak.

So, no #'s this week, only the following observations:

1) I'm going to swim for a long time, and I'll have to be mentally OK with coming out of the water when I do. This was something I struggled a bit with when I did the two half ironmans a few years back. I started riding with a bit of negativity... It's a long day, and a few 10's of minutes in the water won't mean much in the last half of the marathon, I reckon.

2) I rode for around 5 hours, covering about 160k, and found myself at times riding too hard. No PM, but yeah, I rode a bit too hard. I'll remember that first couple hours and how they felt, and remind myself to go easier than that! The last long day I completed, I reckon I forced down the calories a bit too much and wound up a bit bloated near the end. This time around, I ran things way leaner, maybe a bit too lean at about 250 cals/hr or thereabouts. That's a bit too lean on the fuel mixture, but I reckon the low end of the design space is good to know, nonetheless.

3) I only ran for an hour at about 8:30 pace, but felt OK. I'll be going slower on race day, for sure. A marathon is going to be a long ways to run. I do fear the distance a bit to be honest...

Today was pleasantly surprising, 24 hours later, I feel like I'm about 90% recovered. Hopefully, I'll be at 100% for the events of this coming Tuesday:

madonna at petco park

yeah, Selene is a big "Material Girl" fan, so we'll be checking the "slightly older" version of Madonna out this week here at Petco. That'll be interesting - for some reason, I'm curios to see what the makeup of the crowd will be. A-rod teenage fans, or late thirty somethings who grew up with the birth of MTV and the Material Girl!

One way or another, though, I reckon I'll use "the force" at Petco park on Tuesday, and also in Tempe in a few weeks to git 'r dun! :-)

So yeah, life offers up lots of serendipitous moments along the way - I thrive for these moments.

They are simply another opportunity for us to learn more about ourselves and, therefore, build up our experience portfolio.

Don't be afraid to step into the unknown - you just might surprise yourself!

Kona, Ironman... why not?

I knew Ironman Hawaii was happening this weekend, but honestly, I thought it was on Sunday (today)... Not that that scheduling would have affected anything I had planned for yesterday (Saturday).

Here's how my day started:



which is of the sunrise on my way to a 24-hour fitness pool, where I've been spending some early morning time over the past couple months. yeah, I swam, for a little under an hour yesterday morning. Boy, I sure am slow in the water! :)

Then, seeing as how there was still lots of time left in the day, I decided to go ride my TT bike in the crazy (for socal!) 20 mph winds yesterday for ~160k and five hours:



That ride left a little bit of a mark, but I reckoned, hey, why not go for a quick hour long run? y'know to find out how much of a mark that ride left. I managed 8:20 pace for that hour, but definitely would not have been able to run at that clip for 18+ more miles...

By the time I was home and showered, Craig Alexander was done working his way to the front of the field during the marathon, and Chrissie Wellington was still showing the world how dominant she is.

Anywat, I learned some good stuff during my own personal long day. Useful stuff too, as I come closer to toeing the line at IMAZ in November:

1) at my pace in the water (2:15 100's SCY), I've got some things to work on - primarily mental ones!
2) @69kg maybe I really only do need to take down 300-350 cal/hr (I sure hope so, cuz things aren't very happy at a rate higher than that at a variety of intensities and external temperatures!)
3) my bike position is fine for 5+ hours at the intensity I will need (2 rides on the TT bike since May)
4) 26 miles is a long way to run!

I debated with myself about writing anything about this new project I've undertaken (tackling an Ironman), but here it is. I have modest goals for this whole deal - the first of which is to toe the line uninjured. The second of which is to simply delay the true suffering on the big day for as long as possible! ;-)

Me? Do an Ironman using a stripped down approach to training?


why not? :-)

Not much of a mark, it seems

Did a nice trainer spin of 20 minutes or so of actual pedaling yesterday evening ;-) to loosen things up a bit...

...and then proceeded to rip off a pretty standard lunch hour vo2 ride today, so it seems as if not too much damage was done by the longest run of my life on Sunday! More importantly, my knees are staying pretty healthy. In the past (and even as little as 6-8 wks ago!), I've had some issues with ITB stuff (I presume).

For me, it seems as if the knee issues are all related to pace - if I go below 8 min/mile on a run longer than 8k, issues start to come up.

Anyway, interesting running adventure I'm on!

TRIMPS

It's been a long time since I've fired up the ol' TRIMPS software.

alas, the results for 2008 to date are the same as the last time I did this exercise(this plot was created by allowing the TRIMPS model to vary all 6 model parameters to best fit my performance data):



The wiggly lines contain little to no practically usable information, it seems. I reckon there's quite a bit of truth in what Kirk likes to say: "There's no real benefit to pinning a single number on the deal".

My Lunch hour ride today...

...bonus points for those that can decipher the 3-d histograms below (they are the same plot, just from different perspectives)!






ooooh - look at the pretty colors! :-)

I haven't fired up this matlab script in awhile, but when I do, I find that it's a pretty descriptive way to discover the "gold" in my srm files.

From the looks of it, it seems that I can do about 13+ minutes @ 6+W/kg in 70-80 second chunks in around 40 minutes.

Stripped Down - Fill the Right

Well, I got a swift kick in the rear a week or so ago by a BTR/kdublog reader asking what's up with the whole stripped down series... That wasn't the first time I'd heard that! :-)

I finally got the next installment done -> Fill!

Heres the first installment in the series:

http://www.biketechreview.com/performance/stripped_down.htm

and the latest:

http://www.biketechreview.com/performance/stripped_down_3.htm

Alto Velo, Base, and Potential

I was pointed to this thread on a yahoo-based message board:

http://sports.groups.yahoo.com/group/AltoVelo/message/17061

That article about base training that Kirk wrote has been all over cyberspace, it seems. Cool to see that folks are still discussing it this many months past its initial publication! That is the sign of a real good article, IMHO...

I don't know if Kirk would respond like Warren refers to here:

http://sports.groups.yahoo.com/group/AltoVelo/message/17094

However, my personal experience is that I've trained the last couple of years pretty much like I laid out in the second "stripped down" article. I'll fill the right on occasion, as the event demands, or according to my weight goals - and I really consider this type of riding as the "frosting" Warren alludes to - I guess - on a conceptual level at least. Really, though, I pretty much adhere to "base/foundation" as raising the left portion of the power duration curve via "in the red" style of efforts.

On the average, I train less than five hours a week on an annual basis, I reckon - and am reasonably competitive here in the pro masters 35+ class here in socal for events that last from less than an hour to aroudn two and a half hours or so. But I can see how there are multiple paths to the same "potential" so to speak.

Personally, I don't think that one can ever really know if they have reached their "potential", as it is such a ubiquitous/vague concept - the concept of "potential" for me, is kind of like psuedo-science at its core - ya'know, no testable hypothesis...

How do you know if you've reached your potential, anyway? If anyone knows how I can answer that question, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

The caveman way of thinking is that one can only "run what you brung" on a given day so to speak! ;-)

Anyway, Kirk's article is good fodder for discussion all over cyberspace, and I for one, appreciate the time Kirk took to share his perspective and experience on the topic!

The Fiber Profile Column

Whoa, big "whoop-de-doo" over on the BTR forum for the past few weeks where lots of undies got up in a bundle. Ahhh, geeeeeezzzzz, it's just a web forum about bike crap - glad I got the chance to open the johari window for myself a bit in that thread.

Refreshing, in fact, to state some of my values, my ideas on changing behaviors, and having the opportunity to represent what I believe (ya know, bike racing isn't a math problem!) despite being continually attacked by a select few.

Anyway, during the sharing of ideas, I linked to a great thread that took place a long time ago, where Kirk made some good observations back in January of 2006. Here's a particularly relevant post in that thread:

http://biketechreview.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=504&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=fiber+column&start=48

Here's the relevant bits of that post for those averse to clinking on links and whatnot:

"For a given cadence, changes in power (force) are the result of changes in the motor-units recruited. More force, more power, more motor-units. Fatigue can also result in the recruitment of additional motor-units. When motor-units normally recruited at a certain power begin to fatigue (produce less force when they fire), additional motor-units are recruited to take up the slack in order to maintain the power (force). Because of the progressive, sequential nature of motor-unit recruitment with the needed force, increasing power (force) generally requires additional recruitment.

I look at an entire muscle as a column, a column roughly divided up into power levels I call fiber-profiles. At max power (say a 5s sprint), most of the column fires. At low power, only the bottom section associated with that power is used. As fatigue at a given power sets in, the fiber-profile "creeps up” the column, as additional motor-units are recruited to maintain force (added to the top). So, the fiber profile associated with a given power as fatigue sets in includes more motor-units than when fresh.

So, take the example of cruising along at 250w (let’s say that’s a tempo intensity), a certain fiber-profile (composed of individual motor-units) is used to generate the force required to produce 250w. Over time, fatigue will set in within that fiber profile. That fatigue manifests as reduced force. In order to maintain that 250w (force), additional motor-units, ones normally recruited at higher powers, are then brought into that power’s fiber-profile.

So, it terms of recruitment associated with 20MP (or any power), as long as the power is at that level or higher, I know that AT LEAST the smallest potential fiber-profile associated with that power is recruited…and as fatigue sets in…that fiber-profile only grows larger (more motor-units recruited…added to the top) to make up for the drop in force production in the fatigued motor-units. The fatigued motor-units are still recruited, their force production just drops. So, that 250w *may* eventually recruit some of the motor-units normally within the >95% of 20MP profile with sufficient fatigue, but it is unknown to me exactly when this happens. When I train at intensities > a given power, say 95% of 20MP, I know that a given fiber-profile is recruited, and as fatigue sets in, this profile creeps up the column.

So, I think that at least a minimal level of recruitment can be associated with a given power, and that by acknowleding this minimal profile, I can quantify the amount of stimulus seen by that minimal profile (although it may grow to include more motor-units) via my choice of 60s chunks which include that profile (bins or time in zone are similar). I’d love to hear of ways that recruitment order and force production can commonly get tossed out of whack so that limitations to this way of thinking can be identified. If these issues do exist, it may also influence the use of powermeter data in general, because if non-sequential recruitment of motor-units occurs, a given power number has less meaning (at least to me). There is always more to be learned!

Kirk"

Yeah, visualizing things in terms of a column of fiber recruitment makes sense to this caveman, especially considering that when one uses gears, cadence is confined to a relatively small range (outside of the transition to/from coasting).

Good stuff to think about, anyway.

Oh yeah, I've disabled comments on this entry, so, if you'd like to engage others on the topic, feel free to sign up and post your thoughts on the BTR forum:

http://biketechreview.com/phpBB2/index.php

keep it real out there, folks.