I didn’t get quite as much done this weekend as I’d hoped.
In setting up this part of the season—leading up to the Amica Ocean Beach 19.7 (Sprint) Triathlon on July 24th and the Litchfield Hills Olympic Triathlon on August 21st—I’d been planning to focus these last two weeks on swimming and running. Why? A couple of reasons. First, I feel like I’m riding reasonably well. Because of my commute, I’m on my bike at least a little almost every day. And then, too, I finished a metric century just two weeks ago, and I felt great for at least the first fifty or so miles of the ride. My longest race of the season only has a 24-mile bike leg, so I think I’m in pretty good shape there. And in any event, you can’t focus on everything every week. Meanwhile, both my running and my swimming need the work. Running is a perennial weak spot for me, and that same race with the 24-mile bike leg has a 6-mile run right afterwards, a run which I happen to know is gonna hurt me a lot more than the bike leg will. As for swimming, well, one of the things I promised myself this season was that I was gonna make a real effort to do well at the Greenwich Point One-Mile Swim. That race is Saturday, July 9th, two weeks before Ocean Beach and a full six weeks before Litchfield Hills. Translation: I’ve got some time now to put some emphasis into swimming, but after July 9th, I’ll need to switch my focus back to riding and running, and I’ll need to keep it there.
That said, the Greenwich Point One-Mile Swim is not the only reason it’s a good idea for me to spend time swimming now. The other reason that I’ve been swimming more this season—besides the fact that I just like to swim—is that swimming is a safe way for me to put in extra training volume. Because look, training for an Olympic triathlon is decidedly not training for three separate races run in sequence. It’s training for one long race with three separate disciplines. For me, an Oly is a two-and-a-half to three-hour effort. And if I’m going to be racing for that long, then I need to be ready for it. I need to put in enough aerobic volume ahead of time to be able to handle that length of continuous effort on race day. And like it or not, I CANNOT run for three hours straight. My knees won’t survive that kind of training. So the best ways for me to go long are on the bike or in the pool. With these last two weeks being Run/Swim Focus weeks, that means that the majority of my volume needed to come in the water.
Unfortunately, this past week was kind of a wasted training week. I rode my commute four times for a total of about 44-miles, and on Thursday I ran a 4-mile tempo run, but that was all. I never managed to get in the water during the week, and I certainly didn’t get that second mid-week run I’d been hoping for when I set up the idea of a two-week Run/Swim focus. So that left me needing to swim twice on the weekend and hoping to get at least one long run sometime during the weekend as well. Considering that it was also Father’s Day weekend, I didn’t like my chances for getting through all of that.
Before we go on, let’s define a couple of terms:
· Tempo – Tempo pace is fast. When you work at Tempo, you’re pushing but not killing yourself. Certainly you’re not going hard enough to be doing Speed Work. For me, Tempo pace is probably 80% to 85% effort. In heart rate terms, that’s gonna be somewhere north of 160 beats per minute (bpm) but below 170 bpm. You do tempo work in order to train your body to go fast over time. For example, if you do a 5k road race, and you feel like you want to die afterwards, you probably need to do more tempo work.
· Aerobic – Aerobic pace is the pace that you can maintain over an extended length of time. It’s aerobic as opposed to anaerobic exercise, meaning that you’re using oxygen for your metabolic processes no faster than you’re taking it in via respiration. You’re therefore not creating lactic acid in your muscles, which is why you can maintain that steady pace over time. Moreover, when you’re working at an aerobic pace and doing it correctly, you ought to be burning more fat for fuel than glucose, which is why you’ll sometimes see a sticker on the side of the treadmill in the gym that talks about your “ideal fat burning zone” being between around 60% and 80% of your max heart rate. That “ideal fat burning zone” thing is the purest bullshit, but it is true that those long aerobic efforts tend to rely more on fat for fuel than they do simple blood sugar. For the triathlete, aerobic work is base training. You want to go at between 70% and 80% effort. For me, that means a heart rate of between 145 and 160 bpm.
· Speed Work – Doing speed work is practicing to go as fast as you can. You do not take heart rates or measure effort level during speed work. You just go as hard as you can go. That said, triathletes typically do very little speed work. Still, speed work has a decided if limited role in endurance training, especially when you’re trying to come around to your peak form of the season.
· Active Recover – You don’t have to necessarily kill yourself every single time you go out. Sometimes it’s good just to get out there and stretch, work the kinks out, and maybe sweat a little. That’s Active Recovery, and it should be done at around 50% of max effort. For me, that’s done at maybe 120 to 140 bpm. When I do active recovery, I tend to just warm up and then stop and stretch.
· Glucose – Glucose is sugar. Usually when we talk about glucose, we’re talking about blood glucose, meaning the level of sugar that’s dissolved in your blood. Your body always burns a mix of glucose and fat for fuel, but when you’re going fast, you tend to burn more glucose. Glucose is also the only fuel that your brain can burn. Moreover, glucose is a finite fuel whereas every human has an almost inexhaustible supply of fat, even super-skinny marathon dudes. Therefore, one of the main tricks of being an effective triathlete is learning to maintain adequate blood glucose over time during extended efforts. This is especially tricky when you’re racing. It is for this reason that we say “Nutrition is the fourth discipline of triathlon”. There’s a whole science to eating during a race in order to maintain your blood glucose for best possible performance.
· Bonk – You “bonk” when your body runs out of blood glucose. It is not at all fun to bonk.
I mention all of this to show what some of my concerns are when setting up a typical training weekend. Not only is it hard to find the time to train on the weekends, it’s also hard to balance those training times with the need to eat regularly. On the other hand, if you don’t eat, you’ll have no shot at all of training well. For me, keeping my blood sugar up during a long mid-morning or late afternoon workout is the most consistent pain-in-the-ass thing that I deal with in my training.
So. I was planning to swim Friday, do a long Swim/Run brick Saturday morning, and then do another, much shorter Swim/Run brick on Sunday. Ideally, I wanted to put in about 2000 yards of short tempo work on Friday, about 3000 or so yards and 5.5-miles on the road on Saturday (fast aerobic pace), and maybe 1500 yards and 2-miles or so on Sunday (easy, almost active recovery pace). But Sally called while I was on my way home on Friday and asked me to stay home. She was tired from a long week, and honestly, by the time I got home Friday night I was more than ready to give her what she wanted and take the night off.
Unfortunately, that upped the ante for Saturday morning. So now, instead of doing maybe 2500 or 3000 yards, I wrote out a full 3500-yard workout and then packed a Power Bar and a bottle of Gatorade to try to maintain my blood sugar for a long run after that long swim. Which was a fine plan. I mean, training to run when you’re tired is a necessary evil, and so is training with nutrition over an extended period of time. So we headed to the pool, Emma got in the water for her lesson, I got in the water for my workout, and Sally and Hannah started doing yoga. My workout was:
5 x 100 free @ 1:40 – warm up
5 x 300 free @ 4:15 – main set
8 x 50 kick @ 1:05
500 pull
100 easy
8 x 50 @ :50 – alternating fly/free
100 warm down
That took not quite an hour and a half. I’d planned to do mostly tempo-type pace work on the main set and speed work on the fly/free 50s at the end of the workout, but I fell off my pace on the last of the 300s and then ended up doing the rest as a kind of fast aerobic workout. That said, the last set of 50s was tough, and when I finished it, I was rocking a heart rate of probably 175 bpm. It took that much effort just to hold my stroke together, maintain my pace, and make the interval.
Got out of the water, took a shower, and waited for the girls to get out. Since they also had to shower, this ended up taking a while, and by the time we got home, I was STARVING despite the Power Bar and the Gatorade. Moreover, the sun was high in the sky, and Sally suddenly started talking about the auction at my mother’s house, which it turns out was actually scheduled for Saturday rather than Sunday.
So the moral of the story is this: if you want to do a swim/run brick, take your shoes with you to the pool.
As it was, my weekend workout plan came apart on the spot. I ended up spending the next few hours trying to get our new fax/printer/scanner set up, only to discover that the print head was defective. Several maddening hours ensued during which my mother’s house and all of her remaining effects were auctioned, and after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, we eventually got all of the forms we needed to sign sent over via email, printed out, signed, and then ready for faxing back to Tennessee. By mid-afternoon, Sally and Hannah went to go take care of that stuff, Emma went to a birthday party, and I finally got out for my run, but by then it was HOT. I’d wanted to go five miles, but by the time I actually got out of the house, the sun was blazing, and I ended up cutting it short. So I ran four miles in thirty-four minutes—almost exactly an 8:30/mile pace, all aerobic work. And no real complaints. I mean, sometimes you just have to take what you can get. Plus, I felt better running on Saturday than I’d felt earlier in the week, and that by itself was worth something right there.
Sunday was Father’s Day, and I’ll spare you the recap save to say that I did eventually make it to the pool, but I never made it out to run. Still, after my little swim workout, the girls and I played MONSTER, and that’s always fun.
Bottom line, being a successful triathlete is often about balance. Balance you need to go fast with your need for endurance. Balance your nutrition, hydration, and pace. Balance your training across three separate disciplines. And balance your triathlon obsession with the rest of your life and your family. I came down on a different side this weekend, but looking back, that’s probably exactly what I needed.
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