House Keeping

Training for Ironman has given me a new appreciation for the Taper. Finally I have time and workouts are easy and confidence building, or at least they should be.

A lot of athletes find it difficult to taper because they fear losing fitness, or they want to cram in a last few hard workouts. In the last weeks leading up to the race, you won't lose your fitness or strength, but you could start moving backwards if you don't approach the taper properly. I like to call this part of my training "housekeeping".

We need more Lemon Pledge.

The main housekeeping goals of my two weeks leading up to Ironman are as follows:

1. Staying Injury Free
It's too close to race day to recover properly from an injury so the most important thing for me is to make sure I don't get injured. This means I'm not trying any new workouts. Warm-ups and cool-downs are very important, and I stay clear of activities that can cause injury.

2. Staying Healthy
When workouts decrease, diet and hydration become more important. I can't eat greasy food and pop and just go for a long ride to work it off anymore. Eating is now a big part of my training. Everything I consume is for nutrition to help me on race day. It's also important to not let my immune system weaken. Now is a time when many athletes get sick so it is important to wash your hands often and get lots of fluids, vitamins, and rest.

3. Equipment Check-up
Now is the perfect time to get your gear fixed or cleaned or whatever you need to do. New chain, new tires, new shoes, new clothes...there's two weeks to make sure everything is going to go smoothly on race day. I recently changed my chain and brakes on my bike and I will make sure my shoes and wetsuit, etc. are all in good condition before it's too late to change. Don't worry if you are trying new equipment because you still have two weeks to break it in. 

4. Race Day Nutrition
Start thinking about your race day plan...and practice it! I plan on eating 2 gels, oatmeal with milk, toast with peanut butter, coffee and maybe a yogurt before leaving to T1. Then sipping on perform from breakfast to swim start and having another gel or two within 15 minutes of the start. For the next two weeks, I'm going to practice this breakfast first thing in the morning so that I am confident it will agree with me race morning.

5. Confidence
If nothing else, these last two weeks should be when you build confidence in your training. The work has been done and now you can sit back and appreciate your efforts over the previous months. Workouts should be smooth and pace-work be disciplined. Go over mental processes during these last training sessions and practice transitions, eating, and drinking during your workouts.

6. Have a race week plan
The stress of travelling, training, registering, eating, sleeping, and preparing during race week is insane. Have a plan starting with the travel. I get extremely stressed before races when I don't have a schedule so I will make sure to plan out meals, training, registration, and rest ahead of time. This doesn't have to be concrete, but it will save a lot of stress later when you have a schedule to follow.

I will spend the next two weeks perfecting these things so that come race day, I can do all of the little things easily and smoothly. Should anything go wrong, I feel prepared enough that I can deal with solving these problems quickly on the course. If everything goes as planned, I can put all of my energy and focus into racing. 

Everything I do is to hear those 4 words

Believe

With only 4 weeks, 5 days, 14 hours, and 37 minutes (give or take) to Tremblant, it's hard to focus on anything else. I have one more Olympic race this weekend at the Muskoka 5i50 to mix up my training a bit. My goal is to improve from Guelph Lake earlier this year. I went into that race tired and didn't have the energy to race like I can. Hopefully a mild taper this week will make a difference.


Now to the more relevant stuff.


"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." - Eleanor Roosevelt.


If you're doing an Ironman, it likely started out as a dream. Whether that dream was to finish, have a best time, qualify for Kona, or be a Champion, it is the reason you will be at the start line. 


I truly love the psychology of sport and learning what it is that makes people tick. There are hours of interviews with Ironman athletes online and hundreds of different reasons for why they are there, but they all have one thing in common - they believe they can do it. 


To be any level athlete you have to believe you can do it, but it's what you believe you can do that makes you a champion. Craig Alexander, Simon Whitfield, Chris McCormack, Natascha Badmann, Chrissie Wellington, the best athletes in the sport all dreamed they could be the best. They believed they could train the best, deal with pain the best, and push themselves harder than anyone else. 


Goals are what gave them direction toward reaching their dream. Goals should be stepping stones to make sure you stay on track. I dare everyone to set goals - beat a personal best time, run through every aid station, have faster transitions, I even had a goal to smile when I crossed the finish line because I was tired to looking like a grumpy asshole in my finisher photos. It's good to keep your goals simple and in your control. You can control your pace, your effort, your emotions, your focus, going to practice, eating well, but you can't control other racers, wind, waves, heat...etc. If you focus on the things you can control, the results will follow.


All you need to be an Ironman is to believe you can.

Big Miles

If you like sports, then you probably like watching sports. Last week was the   US Olympic Swimming trials and the US Olympic Track and Field trials. This week is the Tour de France. At the end of the month is the Olympics - I can't wait!

My favourite rival to watch this year...go Lochte!

All of this sports action builds my motivation to train and get strong. In my own training, the miles have started to increase. Last weekend included two 150-180K rides and a split 36K run. This weekend will be a 180K ride on Friday, a swim/bike/run on Saturday, and another 180K ride on Sunday. The key to this ridiculous mileage is eating (a lot) and sleeping. 

Six weeks to Ironman...oh man. The team went to race the Tremblant 70.3 at the beginning of the month and do some reconnaissance on the course. Looks AWESOME! A huge way to relieve stress for me is to know what I'm dealing with. The unknown is my biggest stresser before a race so I'm spending lots of time looking at maps, reading articles, talking to teammates about the course, and watching videos of the course (love Youtube). If I've already "seen" the course before I get there then there is one less thing to worry about come race day. 

For every uphill, there better be a downhill

Like I said - eating and sleeping. From now on, it's all about nailing this part of my training. Make sure I get the calories after workouts and recover properly. This means no fast food and less beer (cutting out beer entirely is craziness). This is the best way to prevent injuries and prevent that blah feeling you get from over training. 

It may also be hard to keep the long runs and rides exciting. No one wants to ride back-to-back 180K, so how do you motivate yourself? I try and set goals for each training session. Breaking them up into smaller parts is much more manageable than thinking of it as one huge ride or run or swim. Make mental checkpoints, practice what you will think about on race day, pick new routes, and enjoy the scenery. This is a great time of year to stop for a bit on your long workouts and enjoy yourself. These little tricks make my training way easier.

Every workout at this point should be focused, but enjoyable. If you can't have fun while you're training, it will make race day really difficult.

Guelph Lake

This weekend was the Guelph Lake One Triathlon, my first race of the year. I love this event because all 3 legs are tough and the field is usually strong. If you've never done Guelph Lake, I would highly recommend it.

A few years ago I found a TV Broadcast of the 2002 Guelph Lake One Pro Race, with a local pro Jeff Beech competing in the field. It's really inspiring watching your coach race, and race so fast!

Last year I finished 5th overall in a time of 2:08:58. This year I had the swim of my life getting out of the water in 21:09, and good bike in 1:03:55, but the run was dreadful. I now understand why Macca had so much trouble at the beginning of his comeback to ITU Triathlon. Ironman training makes you strong, but if you want to go fast you need to train fast. Also, with the volume of training that Ironman requires, it takes a lot more time to recover to get ready for a fast race. I finished 14th overall and 2nd in my age-group with a time of 2:09:57. 

Looking ahead to the time I have left, I start to realize how important every training day is. Each time I put on my goggles, helmet, or shoes I think about race day. 5 weeks until my second race in Muskoka, then 4 weeks to Ironman.

When pressure builds, I find a lot of people start to take things too seriously.  

I mean come-on...we all want to win but is it worth losing your shit over?

Every time I get frustrated or overwhelmed I try and find something to laugh at. Hopefully I can find something funny on race day to get me to the finish line - and if I can't, I'll just withdraw things like this from the memory bank.

Cramping

This will be me at the START of the race.

This past weekend I got my first taste of pushing your body to the point where it gives up on you...in a BIG way.


It started on Saturday with pouring rain. Forced to do another workout indoors, I set up the trainer and did a few intervals. Then I went for a quick run outside in the rain. My first workout all week basically.


Sunday was the hottest day ever. And I don't care what the people in Eagleman say...it was hot here too. We started our long ride at 7 in the am. The plan was to ride to Milton and back with a few tempo sections to simulate Ironman race pace.


Well...the first one-hour tempo section was mostly flat or downhill and we averaged 38 km/hr. Effort felt comfortable but maybe a little fast. The second hour tempo started at the base of the escarpment on our way back and was in the mid-day sun with wind in our face...36 km/hr. I now know that this is TOO FAST. After the hour was up, I was overheated and probably very dehydrated. We stopped to cool down with some delicious ice-water near Guelph and took in more salt. One more tempo for 20 minutes and we were back home.


If an Ironman was a 3.8K Swim and a 180K bike...pfffft, no problem. Unfortunately you have to run after. To simulate this pain, we decided to copy a workout from Crowie, which includes doing km or mile repeats after a long ride. The first one wasn't bad after the legs got used to moving again. The second one felt even better. The third repeat felt like this.

Except for the female part, this was me.

My left leg cramped so hard I fell to the ground and couldn't move (Damn you Craig Alexander). After 2 solid minutes of writhing pain I got up and started slowly jogging back to the safety and comfort of my water bottle. It didn't cramp again, but that was the last interval of the day.


Diagnosis:  Muscle Cramp;


Cause: Biking too friggin hard and trying to run after;


Treatment: Salt and Water;


Prevention: More salt and hydration while biking, and less biking;


I think this was a good experience (good in the kind of way that it sucked) because I now know not to do this in a race and hopefully this won't happen in Tremblant.

Detroit

This week is a bit of a curve ball. I had a great training week planned with quality swimming and biking and running, and I'm spending it at a conference in Detroit. No pool, no bike, and running after dark isn't exactly the safest activity. 


I know some people that I train with get stressed and worked-up when they can't train, but I find it relaxing. So since I'm taking a few days off, I thought I'd talk about Detroit.


First of all, it's not as bad as I thought it would be. Other than the window in a parking garage with, I swear-to-god a bullet hole in it, I was expecting an 8-mile scene. Instead we got to ride a sick raised light-rail transit system through the city, walked along the waterfront, and went to an awesome Greek restaurant called Pegasus Tavernas.


Firstly I'd like to point out that along the river there were mile markers and a running path for runners. That would be a cool thing to add the the trails in Waterloo to keep track of distance. The second thing is that there are bike lanes EVERYWHERE. Why can't we have that, I mean if a city like Detroit can put them in, why are we having such a difficult time understanding how useful they are.


There are some reputations that are apparently true however. We asked the concierge about a restaurant called Mexican Village that my swim coach told us to go to. She replied kindly with, "It's good but don't go after dark because it tends to get a little Gangy." So all of my opinions on Detroit are based on daylight hours.


Back to the point of this post. I plan to look at this training break in a positive way and use it to recover and get ready for a big weekend. If Jeffie can get sick or injured as often as he does and still run like the wind on Thursday workouts, I don't think a few days will hurt.

Youtube = #1 Training Aid

11 WEEKS!!!

I think this weekend I realized how little time 11 weeks is...this weekend I did spin class, in 2 weeks I have convocation at UW, a few weeks after that is a training weekend at the cottage, then - taper weeks start! Usually it takes 6 months to prepare for an ironman, not 12 weeks.

This weekend was the first rainy weekend we've had this spring so the long ride was moved indoors. There's nothing worse than having to ride inside when you've been able to ride outside for weeks. The good news is I got to be the coach. 

Spinning as the coach is waaay harder because you can't slack. You need to be the motivator for everyone else - and pumping out that much encouragement takes a lot of energy. I think I may have discovered something though - motivating everyone else made my biking stronger and I found new energy when I was tired. On race day I think I'll have to remember this and maybe even scream out encouragement to myself when it gets difficult.

One more thing I thought about this week is how on earth we, as triathletes, find the inspiration to get up before the sun every day and do everything it is that we do. Let me give a brief breakdown of my workout week with Team ENERGi;

Monday: 6:15-7:45 swim (coached)

             8:00-8:45 run (track speedwork)

              17:00-18:30 strength & weights (20 min run warm-up)

Tuesday: 17:30-19:30 bike (speed work and hills, short run off the bike)

Wednesday: 6:15-7:45 swim (coached)

                   8:00-10:00 bike (easy aerobic miles)

                    17:00-18:00 recovery run

Thursday: 18:00-19:30 run (speed work and hills)

Friday: 6:30-8:00 swim (distance swim, wetsuit optional)

           17:00-18:00 optional easy bike/run

Saturday: 8:00-... bike 100+ km (moderate pace, run off the bike 30 mins)

Sunday: 8:00-... run (20+ km long run, optional bike before run)

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=20+ hours/week; and I probably spend just as much time eating...seriously.

Sometimes the hardest part about a workout is just getting there. I think many would agree that it's easy to lose focus and motivation to keep training this much every week. This is where Youtube comes in.

I get most of my inspiration to train and race from Youtube (not all of youtube, but a lot of it). It's like the video hub for everything anyone has ever thought or done while they had a camera handy. Whenever I'm tired, or in a rut, I get on Youtube and watch old triathlons, Ironmans, Swim Championships, etc. My favourite has been watching "The Road to Kona" featuring Craig Alexander. There's also a good NBC special on Macca and the 2011 Hawaii Ironman. If you have some free time, I highly recommend watching these.

Nothing, however, gets me as pumped up as watching the Kona swim start does (this one's is my favourite).