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!