Spring is approaching!

Some of us remember last spring - the spring that taunted us with nice weather during the week and blistered us with rain, wind and frozen precipitation into April.  We finally got fed up with the weather in mid-April and decided to go for a nice little 60 mile ride on the Musselman course in 38 degree temperatures, 40 mph winds, and heavy rain.  I knew I was in trouble when my left foot was frozen before mile 3.

The wind tore this flag from its perch at the
Geneva Chamber of Commerce!!!

Actually, I'd rather not talk about that anymore.


This year, we've also been trying to get out to do our 60 minute power tests on the road.  There's really not much point in doing this test on the trainer.  You really need to have some cooling airflow in order to have a meaningful test, and a 20 minute test on the trainer just doesn't cut it.  We've found that the 20 minute number is not a good picture of the power you'll be able to hold for rides over an hour since it tends to favor athletes with a high anaerobic capacity.  


We've not yet been able to get a weekend with dry roads and temperatures in the 30's, but we know we'll get it in eventually!


It's really been enjoyable to see how much everyone is improving.  We've had several athletes reporting PR's in their swims at distances from 100's to 1600's not only through fitness improvements, but also by correcting deficiencies in stroke mechanics and body position errors.  


We've also seen some extremely solid run performances surprisingly early in the year.  The miles and miles of steady state aerobic base work is paying dividends in run performances.  Joe Tally is one of our training plan athletes who has been participating in the Fleet Feet winter run series, and can't seem to keep from getting a PR at nearly every event.  The coolest part of his PR's is that he hasn't done any fast run training yet this year and has had super slippery footing at several races!  This further proves our point about consistency in running being the most important ingredient to success.  


I absolutely love watching the athletes improve their performances throughout the training season, and it's been very interesting to have done our run and bike performance testing with blood lactate sampling throughout the base period.  We've been able to tailor workouts to the individual's physiology, and then conduct a retest to make sure we're achieving the desired result.  

Ryan Cameron has had a great year of improvement on the
bike and has improved his watts at Max_LaSS over 30%!
Ryan will be competing in Ironman Lake Placid this summer.

Several athletes have actually had to slow down their training (or more accurately "reduce their intensity") to get faster on the bike, and we've found how difficult it can be to conduct threshold intervals with just a heart rate monitor.  In every athlete that we've tested that has done threshold intervals without a power meter, their aerobic capacity has actually decreased while their anaerobic capacity has increased!  Without lactate testing, we might wonder why the athlete's functional threshold power has stagnated or regressed.  We can now actually peer into the actual physiology within the athlete in a way that was not possible previously, and can see that this athlete was turning into a "sports car" instead of a "diesel engine".


Very exciting stuff for 2012!  Nice Tri has been blessed with a full quiver of dedicated and talented athletes, and we even have four triathletes that are hoping to acquire their pro cards this year.  The coolest part about the athletes on our team is their friendly and approachable demeanor, so if you see someone in a Nice Tri jersey this year, stop and say "hi"!  I'm sure they'd love to tell you about how their year is going, what races they'll be doing, their favorite gel flavor, the most comfortable type of chamois butter....

Understanding why...

What purpose does this workout serve for me?  What is this workout trying to help me accomplish?  Does this workout display my current level of fitness?


You should be able to answer these questions at any time as you progress through your training year.  If you can't - ask!  Understanding why a given workout is on your plan can help improve your motivation to follow through with the training set as it's written, and it can also be motivational to track fitness improvements throughout the year.  Not every workout serves as a fitness marker, but generally each workout serves one of these three following purposes:

1. To recover from previous workouts
2. To improve your level of fitness
3. To maintain your level of fitness

Recovery is as important as the level of training stress that you place on your body.  Without adequate recovery, you are constantly breaking the body down and not allowing it to build itself back up (also known as "supercompensation").  Eventually, you will have over-reached your body's limits to build itself back up adequately and may become demotivated, slower, or sick.  This is a great article on overreaching: Overreaching in Training.

Each individual requires a different amount of recovery.  Your individual amount of recovery needed may be influenced by the amount of sleep you get, hydration and nutritional habits, genetic ability to recover, etc.  Each week we will place a measured training load on our bodies, and we always want to perform a given run or bike a little faster than the week before, but is this reasonable?  Let's look at the second purpose of a workout - To improve our fitness.

The purpose of a group of workouts (also known as "Training Stress") is to break the body down slightly, allow it to recover, and to build itself up stronger than it was when we started.  As we mentioned previously, this is known as "supercompensation".  However, if we're in the middle of a build cycle with a high level of training stress (or even a base cycle for that matter), should we expect to see levels of supercompensation?  If so, when?  How much?  At what distance, time or intensity level?

As is the case with many issues in exercise physiology - it depends!

It is possible that if we're building up an athlete's aerobic capacity, that they can expect to see a decrease in their anaerobic capacity.  In other words, an athlete might be faster at longer rides or runs than they were 6 months ago, but are actually slower at shorter rides and runs.  This is to be expected and is precisely why we talk about goal races and distances.  You won't find an athlete that's a gifted marathon runner and also a gifted 400 meter sprinter.  In the Olympics, you won't see an athlete run a world record marathon and also run a world record sprint race.  It just doesn't happen!  Pick your distance, train that distance, and expect to see improvement at that distance.  However, you should also expect to see performance levels drop at other distances.  This is all part of tailoring the anaerobic capacity to the athlete for the distance at which they hope to succeed.

For example, you might find that after a 12 week block of aerobic capacity training (2-3 hour rides in your aerobic zone) that your CP20 (Critical Power for 20 minutes) has actually decreased.  Does this mean that you're slower on the bike now?  If your races are 20 minutes long, the answer is yes!  However, the reason that you were prescribed a block of 2-3 hour aerobic capacity rides is probably because your goal race is longer than 20 minutes.  This is one example of a fitness test not being a good representation of race fitness.  Another example would be doing 200 and 400 meter sprint workouts as a measure of your Ironman marathon fitness.  Reality check - not many Ironman athletes need to improve their 400 meter kick at the finish line!

In other words, the "test" that you're using should measure the goal of the training.  

During the training block, we do have days that are considered "performance markers".  Sometimes these markers are physiological tests (such as lactate tests), but they may also be individual races.  It is important that if we are looking at a performance marker mid-build that we don't compare that marker with one that we'd see after a recovery week or taper.  Our number one goal is to race as fast as possible, not to train as fast as possible.  I don't care how fast you did your "10 x 800 meter repeats at Ludicrous Pace" mid-build if you can't hold  pace at the half marathon on race day.  Workout stats are usually for impressing your friends on Facebook, but remember that there's a difference between training and racing.  A workout is not a race.  A race is a race!

I recommend physiological testing every 6-8 weeks for my athletes.  This is the ONLY way to measure adaptations within the body.  The tests are not subjective and the blood does not lie. You're either improving, staying the same, or regressing.

It is also possible to prescribe a series of workouts to maintain one's level of fitness.  For example, if an athlete needs to improve their swim, they may elect to go into a maintenance protocol on the bike or run.  Don't believe me?  Look at TJ Tollakson's training logs and see how much cycling and running he did during the months of November and December.  He was swimming about 45,000 yards per week, and cycling and running just enough to minimize his fitness loss during this period.

There you have it!  When you're working out, you're either recovering, improving or maintaining your fitness.  If you don't know which of these goals an individual workout serves, ask your coach to tell you.  After all, that's why we're here!  Finally, the true measure of your fitness is on race day.  Learn to look at each workout as another building block in your foundation to faster finishing times on race day, and this will help you stay within the prescribed intent of your workout session.