Entries tagged with “training” from TRI-ing harder

I have many half-baked theories on what motivates me and might motivate other people.  Here are some of my recent ones:

1. Train with others
This is something that everyone who's ever trained in a group knows - training with others works you harder than training on your own.  Obviously, this assumes you're all of a similar level, and all training as opposed to just out for a gentle bike ride to the pub... On your own, it's easy to back off, tell yourself you've done enough, or get lost in the moment and forget you're meant to be training (my mind wanders terribly when I'm swimming, for instance). 

But if there are others around you will be able to challenge each other. One of you lifts off but the other will keep pushing, if your buddy sprints up the hill you have to follow them.  And these little races make all the difference in turning a mediocre session into one that will have you vomiting at the end.

As anyone who knows me, or reads my Facebook profile would know I'm not normally a religious man.  But tonight I felt unusual forces were at play...

Although I've been doing more running this year, I'm not really pushing the distances.  I tend to do short, easy, 2 mile runs at lunchtime with work colleagues, and my gym runs are normally brick sessions combining a 40k cycle with a run.  These are normally only 5k runs at best because I'm hot, knackered and bored by this time.   Windsor is now only 4 weeks away so I'm getting nervous about the 10k run at the end and I just know I need to do some more and longer runs. 

It was a lovely sunny evening today and so I decided to go for a run.  Heading down to Cutteslowe Park's measured mile, my plan was to complete 10k (just over 6 laps). 

I often wonder how I'm going to fit in all of the training that I want to do. A few runs each week is easy, as are a couple of hundred kilometres on the bike. And a few thousand metres swimming is a doddle to do before or after work. But all three? In just seven days (or 8 in a leap year)? How does a humble, work-a-day triathlete like me fit it all in? Oh to be a mere runner.

Bert woke me at 7am this morning with the usual 'flap,flap, flap' on the letterbox which tells me that he and Ernie are still waiting for their breakfast. Normally this is a bit of a rude awakening, but with only a half bottle of wine last night, I felt surprisingly chipper, and the clear, bright blue sky made me feel good about the day.  I decided to do something useful. 

Sophie had helpfully reminded me yesterday that I need to work some more on my swim if I'm going to survive Windsor, and as I brewed my cup of tea I realised I only have 8 weeks before my first swim (at Blenheim), and only 9 weeks before Windsor!  I had found my something useful.

Windsor triathlon on June 15th is an Olympic distance (1500m swim, 40km bike, 10km ride), which is longer than the sprints I've done before, so I'm a bit nervous. I've also been told it's quite hilly but I'm ignoring that for now!  It's important to me that I know I can complete the distance, even if it's slowly, and doing a couple of 'trial' sprint triathlons before my first one in Newbury a couple of years ago was definitely a confidence booster.

So I've been working up to the full distance over the past few weeks, in the hope that I can do a couple of trial Olympic distance bike/runs before the event, and I'm almost there.  I've increased my run distances significantly since September last year, and can now run about 12km before I completely fall apart. But I've really neglected my cycling and swimming. Swimming will have to wait for now, as today I did a brick session (bike and run), which this time I did as a 40km bike ride and a 5km run.  The run was a bit slower than I hoped (27m), but after a 40km ride I can forgive myself.   Brick sessions are great practice for the day because they teach your body how to cope with the bike/run transition, which I think is far and away the hardest part of the triathlon.  So I'm pleased I completed the whole lot in about 1.5 hours, and probably could have run a bit further ifI hadn't gotten bored.

Next time:full bike and run distance, then the lake at Cassington opens up in a few weeks so I can get back into the swimming practice!

I've just started working with a chap (Robin Akers) who is doing a research programme into explosive and/or resistance training and its effect on time trial performance.  He's going to be working with a number of amateur triathletes to see whether certain training regimes will improve their power capabilities and performance more than others.

The programme will last for six weeks, and I'm not sure yet what it will entail for me, because it depends which training group Robin puts me into.  I may even be in the control group where I don't need to do anything other than my normal training programme (here's hoping!)

To start with, he wanted to take a 'baseline' power measurement, so he can say how much (or little) I improve over the six weeks.  This was mainly what appealed to me, because I've heard a lot recently about how power-based training can be more effective than that based solely on heart-rate and HR zones.  Since I didn't have any idea what my power output was, I thought it would be good to find this out, and hopefully improve it.

He worked out my baseline power by measuring my output during a 10 mile indoor time trial, using a PowerTap hub which measures power, cadence and speed.   The PowerTap reported that I averaged 205 watts over the 28 minutes of the TT.  This compares very poorly with some of the other people he's measured so far (I will probably be the worst!), with the best so far coming in at sub-20 minutes and with an average power of over 300 watts.  But, at least now I have something to improve on!

I've previously read that a good starting point is:
    average power (watts) =~ 2.5-3 * body weight (kg)
So, at 76kg, that would give me an average power output of 190-228 watts.

Today I found another formula by Jim Martin of the University of Utah, which seems more precise.  You can see the details here, but basically it's:
    power (watts) = 60 * Body weight (lb.) /10k run time (minutes)

Again, for me, that would give

power (watts) = 60 *167.55 / 52 = 193.32

So at 205 watts average, I'm about on the money.  I've definitely got a lot to do, and as well as improving my power I also need to improve my technique (I'm very inconsistent with my cadence and gearing over the 10miles), but hopefully by doing this programme with Robin I will be able to focus a bit more on this aspect of my training and things will start to improve.

Oh, and if anyone wants to donate a PowerTap hub to my cause, you can buy me one here.

Our friend Joe, over at Joseph Bloggs has been challenged by his brother-in-law to run the Grim Challenge, an 8 mile "Cross-country" jaunty in December (where "Cross-country" means cold mud, cold water and cold muddy water).  This is where off-the-cuff bravado gets you, Joe - beware!

And muggins here has agreed to do it with him... I figure I'll be done with the triathlon season by October and will have time to train up for some off-roading. And anyway, the ERR crew keep telling me how wonderful cross-country is.  Let's see where off-the-cuff bravado gets me.

Joe plays a lot of football (quite well too - or so he tells me), so is fit enough, but he doesn't do much "running" (as opposed to sprinting back and forth and falling over, which I think is the key skill in football).  So he wants to know how fast and how far he can run. This is presumably so that when he puts a nice little wager down on himself he can do it with some accuracy. 

We went out for a first run together this morning.  I very rarely run "with" someone else (as opposed to "against" them), but as I've said before it can be very motivating and gives two great benefits:

• it allows me to run at a different pace from my normal plod (we started off more slowly because Joe only has little legs, but then sprinted like a bugger when we started discussing Fartlek sessions)
• the time seems to go more quickly when you have someone to chat with

Joe measured out a route for us of abovut 2 miles on the GMap Pedometer. If you haven't seen this site, it's a fantastic tool for runner or cyclists, and allows you to easily plan or review a route you want to use.  It can even estimate the number of calories you'll burn (on a run) if you're that way inclined.

I also made more use of my Nike+ and ipod, just to track our pace and distance.  It really is a fantastic tool, and despite what I say about about real-life-people being motivating, I get a bigger buzz from Lance Armstrong saying "Well done" to me at the end of a long workout!  I'll do a review at some point, but for now, and at last, here is the point of this article: the Nike+ website lets you graph your runs, so here, Joe, is our run.  The 1st and 6th km are my runs from my house to the 'so called mid-point' between our houses. But the rest is pure Joe.

I'm pleased with myself tonight because I have run 10k for the first time ever.  The furthest I've run before was just over 7k, in preparation for the Oxford Tri club championships, and although in theory I knew I could run 10k, I'd never actually gotten round to doing it - running is still not my strong point.

I'm running the Eynsham Road Runners 10k race on 25th November.  Anyone who knows the Road Runners know that they're a bit crayzeee, but luckily they've decided that it makes sense for members to be barred from the actual race (partly so they don't take up all the places, and partly so they have a ready-made team of marshals on the day).

The bad news is they've attracted lots of other crayzeees over the 19 years the race has run so far, so it's quite a competitive event.  I'm happy to be last, but I don't want to be last by too great a margin, so I've been thinking it's important to get a couple of 10ks under my belt before the day.

So this evening was an important psychological step, proving that I really can run 10k, and in a semi-respectable time of 57 minutes.  I'm hoping to get down below 55 minutes before the day (which should be realistic based on my 26 minute 5k time).

OK, so it was indoors on a treadmill, but I did run it at 1% incline so honestly, it felt like hard work!

There's no white line on the bottom of the lake, and you don't often get a rope to guide you, so I always have trouble swimming in a straight line in open water.  Bearing that in mind here are my top tips for how to swim in a straight line:

1. Bi-lateral breathing
   When I learnt to swim at school, I was taught to swim every 4th stroke, and always breathe to the right hand side.  This makes for an inherently uneven swim stroke, and can tend to drag you to one side.   Learning to breathe every 3 strokes, and breathe on the right and the left can help you go straighter.
   
2. Look where you're going
   If you're swimming breastroke, you'll tend to go in a straight line, but because your head is underwater 90% of the time with front crawl, you'll find yourself swimming in circles unless you learn a technique known as sighting.  Before you start off in the direction of the next buoy, work out where it is in relation to something large and obvious in the landscape - a large tree or electricity pylon is good. Then  aim to look up every 10-15 strokes, either as part of your breathing motion, or by just slightly bringing your eyes to the surface, and see where your point of reference is.  Make small adjustments if you go off track rather than large movements which can be the start of a wild zig-zagging motion which can significantly increase the distance you end up swimming!

The Oxford Tri club's event is on next Saturday morning, starting at Cassington Lake and involving a 1200m swim, 29km ride and 7.2km run.  This is about half-way between a sprint and an olympic distance, so will be an interesting extra challenge for me.

I decided to give it a try today to make sure it wasn't going to completely kill me next weekend. 

The chap in the UK Nike+ advert (see YouTube) is "addicted" to running.  For those of you who haven't seen the Nike+, see this post.

Now motivation to run has long been a problem for me.  I don't really enjoy running yet, and it always feels soooo sllooooowwww (probably because I'm doing it wrong).  Why plod along at 12kmph when I could be whizzing along on my bike at 40kmph instead?  Goddamit people, I've got places to go!   So I don't run as often as I should, and when I do run I tend to get bored pretty quickly.  Normally boredom sets in after about the first 1km, which makes 5km more of an achievement that you might have thought!

As a geek who can't run far without getting bored and who has a need to learn how to run 10k for an Olympic distance triathlon next year, the answer seems obvious. I need something addictive.  So an ipod nano and nike+ has been on my wish list for some time.   But my wish list is quite long (and my pockets are not that deep), so I've sulkily coped with poor running motivation for some time.  But it turns out I was wrong.  I don't need to spend money to go faster.

I'm currently capable of a Sprint distance, but I've "done that" now, so want to move up to Olympic next year.  Robbie has suggested that Windsor is a good 10k, so I'm going to try that one out.

I have a lot to do before I can swim, cycle and run that far, so I thought I'd put my current training schedule up here, so you can tell me how inadequate it is!  I'll find a way to track my progress as well...