Getting into gear… cross country gear…

Motivation to kick some change in form has been quite high for the last few months. I decided that the running needed a good kick in the pants – as I have not really done any proper run training for almost 10 years, I was very much on borrowed time for reasonable performances running wise.

Last year was similar. I registered for the cross country season, and did two races – the first and the last! I think the season was interrupted with a couple of injuries and a couple of trips over seas. This year will be different (he says with fingers and toes crossed). I even took the spikes out at did a couple of short runs in them, just to get use to them, to try to minimise the injury risk. The first was out at Pukekohe, a nice undulating course. I still felt well under done on the start line– a little bit like the fat kid that gets picked last. I thought I had managed to hide well in the middle of the pack at the start, and with about 10 seconds to go, the guy in front of me panics as he realises he is at the front and should not be there. I was quite funny watching him turn and barge through the pack in the opposite direction. However, the funny side soon turn to dread as I was the one that was shoved out of the way, and was now right up the front. My plans for a building effort were now radically changed to “dam – I better get out of here fast or I am going to be trampled to death!”. I did manage to see the front runners at the first corner, and then it was slowly drift back through the field, to my rightful mid-pack position. As the race progressed everything was hurting. The lungs were burning, the legs were screaming – especially the calves, and it felt like I was just plodding along. Normally I feel like I take corners and gradual down hills quite well, but on this day I was struggling to run around the corners and the down hills got slower and slower. The frustration level went up a notch when the guy in front of me had his spikes fall apart, and he was still running faster than me with the sole of his shoe flapping all over the place! The torment finally ended, but the pain did not subside. The legs were at about the same pain level as post Ironman – it was ridiculous! The only redeeming features were that it must get better and I found out I had somehow burgled 3^rd place in the younger vet category (would have been 4^th in the older vets category!).

Race 2 of the cross country series was a flat and faster affair, but at 8.6km, and reasonably soft underfoot it was not going to be easy. Especially when my longest run has been around 14km (eek!). I managed a more sensible start this time and settled in to a small group. I quickly decided I was the weak runner of the group and should sit on the shoulder of the best wind break there was. I was probably the biggest pain in the butt of the group, sitting really close in behind. I ended up with a few cuts in the knees where I got clipped by the spikes of those running in front of me. A couple of times I had to pull the guy up in front of me as I half tripped him up. He was pretty good about it – I think if it was me I would have said something! I felt a lot more in control and felt I did have a choice in speed – it was not just survival. When there were surges, I could react, and I was happy going a bit slower when the pace did drop a little (in fact I was quite happy!). The last 1km was always going to be interesting. Our group was down to three, and one took off with a good 800m to go, and he was gone. I was still sitting on the shoulder as we turned the last corner and preparing to launch what sprint I had. The guy in front slowed a little, so I went full speed – with a slight feeling of guilt as I had sat on him for the last 7km or so. But that guilt was soon cleansed, as he then rolled me with 50m to go with easy! It was actually good fun – we had a great little race within the race. I managed another 3^rd – so in the money again – so to speak!

I missed race three – as I was full of the flu. Which basically took me out of action for 2 weeks. And getting back into training was a fairly slow. So rather than progress forward in June, it was a case of back up a couple of steps. The first few runs back were pretty ugly to be fair.

Race 4 of the series was a flat and fast race at Long bay – just 4km this time. I was only just starting to recover from the bugs, so was net expecting too much. It was a little soft underfoot, and there were a few good down pours during the warm-up. I was going to be a fast start and see how long I could hold on for. The gun went off – and I went out strong – but not too silly. Could see the front of the race, and was even in front of a few guns in the first km. But then went back a little and settled into a solid pace. The top end was certainly missing, better than it had been even earlier in the week, but when I pushed on the gas pedal – the body just laughed and said “– yeah right, who are you kidding…”. Got a bit ass kicked, and had the lungs well and truly cleaned out. But it was motivating to get out and do more run training. So not all bad…

So where is the training at now? Well, here is a summary:

Swimming – 2 swims this week, which makes 4 for the month of June (ouch), and the local pool is closed for 5 weeks to do the maintenance that they should have done last year when it was closed, rather than just tile around the edges! So fair to say it is quite a sad state of affairs.

Cycling – two class rides and a couple of rides with the school girls (weather playing its part). The last long ride was February. Power levels at the interval session where dropping, but appear to have stabilized a little. Cycling is at a maintaining minimal level of fitness to “do the job” at the moment. I think 4-6 weeks of long rides and one other easier ride and that will come back a bit. So not too bad.

Running – have tried to do at least 4 runs per week. This is going OK. Long runs are still lacking, and struggling to get over an hour and a half. The flu certainly knock me around a bit, but with a good couple of weeks of running I think I can start to lift the running up a little. I am almost at a point where I can now run fit enough to do some good run training. I would like to get in a few 70+km/week training weeks. Mostly just need to organise my ass into gear to do this I think.

seminars...

I have been to a couple of seminars in the last couple of months. Last weekend was a power training seminar by Hunter Allen - co-author of "Training and Racing with a powermeter", and before that was by Jack Daniels - Author of "Daniels running formulae". Both were good talks, although if you have read the book and associated literature on-line, there was nothing new at the talks/seminars - for me at least.
Jack Daniels comes from a modern Pentathlon background (Olympic level) and is well in to his seventies now. He has a huge coaching reputation, and certainly knows his stuff. He told a great story, and easily transferred the mostly information the clearest in the time he had available. He seamed to be a really nice guy too!

One of the opening anecdotes that Jack gave started with a Q & A he had with an athlete. Something along the lines of: What is the biggest training run you have done? Bit over 100km (did this more than once). What is the biggest training week? 600km (yes - running!). Highest average mileage for a 6 week period? 500km per week. Greatest average mileage per week for a year? 400km per week. This person was an Olympian, and only had one injury as a runner - which was when he was hit by a car while out running. The moral of this story was that everyone is very individual and you can't just copy what the good guys do! Thank goodness! Does put hard weeks in perspective though.
The big thing I like about Jacks book and philosophy is the Mdot tables. These are basically forcing everyone on to a VO2 max line based on your current performance. You put in a current performance (any performance over a range of distances), and the tables give you an Mdot value. This is basically an estimate of VO2max. Your training paces are then set from this value. The training zones that he uses are easy, marathon pace, threshold, intervals, and reps. He basically recommends a mixture of intensities in a training program for everyone. What mix you use depends on what you are training for

Hunter Allen was a very different presenter, and came from a different direction - a little more commercial angle (buy my book and software), but still presented plenty of information, and he did it quite well. He was quite focused on a “training is testing and testing is training” mantra. It was almost to the point of what can we test and how many ways can we test things. This is all very interesting, and I am sure plenty of people love to see where they stack up on the various tables and rankings. I have found the power profiling table interesting – and this is a table of power-to-weight tables for power outputs for 5sec, 1min, 5min and FT (functional threshold). You can see if you are world class, very good, or just plain unfit! They have also just developed a table on power drop-offs for the various energy systems.
I don’t think the absolute numbers are that accurate – good for general trends, but from my experience, the numbers are a little off. I would guess that the data used to develop the tables is quite selective (from those associated with training peaks and with power meters), rather than a true representation of the population. The other issue for some, is that there actual peak powers for different times may not be that representative. Certainly for the shorter power outputs, motivation is a key component to getting good numbers. A bike race is going to get different peak powers to a bike leg in a triathlon (well – should do anyway!). That aside, you can see where your relative strengths and weaknesses are, for the different energy systems.
There are plenty of graphing options, and one of the bigger things promoted was the performance manager. The aim here was to “quantify your training load and plan your season perfectly to maximize your training”. The formulae behind this comes from Form = Fitness + Freshness. The more training load up put in the fitter you get, but you reduce your fitness. And the more you rest, the better your freshness is, but may compromise the fitness. Fitness is from training stress, which is made up of “chronic training load” (longer term – workouts up to 6 weeks ago) and “acute training load” – which is the more recent sessions (up to 14 days ago). Then the “training stress balance” is the balance of the total training stress and rest, and trends in this should indicate whether you are looking at performing well or a bit tired from a high training load (or potentially overtraining). My feeling was that this does give a good indication of training load, but does nothing to indicate how you are actually adapting to the training load, or what training load is optimal for you. So in short, you still have to decide on what you think will work. I guess over a long period of time with a few results in there, you could get a good idea of how the training load correlates with various performance. However I would suspect there are many other factors that also need to be considered, and not only training load dictates performance.
So overall it was great for those that love graphs and to analyse as much data as they possibly can. How ever this can lead to Paralysis by analysis – especially when you spend more time analysing than actually training. Next on the problem list is the quality of data – garbage in and you get garbage out. If you have low quality data going in, the results you get out are also low quality.

From a philosophical point of view, I think too much testing and too much “best possible effort” is not optimal for the best increase in fitness. Then if you follow on from that point, the data you are putting out (best powers) are not truly representative of your current fitness. If you are using that data as if it is your best, the analysis based on that data is incorrect. Finding the training mix that that does give the optimal increase in performance that you want is the tricky bit!