Internet Findings

The new promo for next years ITU series is up. Not the most exciting, but still fun nonetheless.

Also, I was wasting time today and came across this website by Elizabeth Kreutz.

Some pretty cool photos on there, this one I liked a lot. Not that I would ever do this, but think its cool all the same.

There is also a pretty cool section of photo's showing Lance Armstrong's comeback effort, check out the shape he is in. That guy is going to need to lose some upper body weight to get back into grand tour fitness, he looks more like a hockey player than a cyclist.

YIKES!

Its supposed to go down to -15*C Saturday overnight, where am I? I thought I had left Montreal cold for Vancouver. Oh well. It will be practice for when I go back east next week

RunningRunningRunningRunningRunning

Woo! Running!

I went back to practice once again today with the goal to complete the whole thing.

The beauty of being the run coach is that you can decide how long a practice is!

Tonights practice started out with a Fartlek workout, roughly a 500m square block where the north south side you ran hard, while the east west sides you ran easy.

The workout prescribed 5 laps of the block (Now I thought this block was longer, as in more the 1km range so we were finished much earlier than anticipated).

I completed this feeling pretty good, absolutely no pain in my foot and legs were holding together which pleased me considering I hadn't done any real interval work in months.

Since we were finished the workout in 20 minutes including warmup and drills, I decided since today was out last run before Christmas break that we would mix things up and have some fun. I decided to throw in a relay race. 

The relay was 1 lap around the 1km loop, tag your runner, and then as soon as your team has finished the 1km loop, do the same for the 500m loop. We were six runners tonight so I just casually split up the teams and hoped that they would be somewhat fair. 

WOW tight match.

After the 1km loop my team was roughly 10 steps behind, a gap that was held steady until the final 500m where Andrew and I were running anchor for our respective teams. I tried my hardest to close the gap, using my old track and field days as inspiration, in the final 100m I put in the real oomph, and managed to bring it to within a few inches, but Andrew held me off.

Long story short, Managed the full practice and felt great doing it. No foot pain!

Granted this was probably the dumbest exercise I could have finished the practice with, but I was feeling good and willing to have some fun. And I think it went over pretty well, people enjoyed it.

Just to give a review, that 1km lap was run in about 3:05....

It hurt!

I'm going to go cough up a lung now, have a good night!

Rollers Update

Alright, now that I've had them for a few days I can give my first feelings on them.

So far so good. I've gotten used to them quite quickly. There is a very quick learning curve, once you get the confidence that you aren't going to fall they are quite simple.

In my first half hour on them I managed to get my water bottle, reach my back pocket to fiddle with my iPod and ride with one leg, then finally no hands. I've ridden for 30 minutes each day since getting them and have simply been working on these skills as along with simple balance.

One of the concerns I had in getting rollers was that I was told you can't do power workouts, you can only spin all the time. This turns out to be only partly true. Fair enough I can't do standing climbing exercises, however, if you drop your bike into the heaviest gear, you can definitely break out a heavy sweat. Some intervals I've been doing have been 5 minutes trying to keep the bike speed above 50kph, and I'll tell you, rollers can make your legs burn.

That being said, there will be a lot of good time trial action going on this winter where I can work on maintaining a constant effort for extended periods of time. I'll just have to work on explosive power at the gym.

17 Days till Christmas!

First Time on Rollers

Alright, so I got my rollers this afternoon, and today was my first time trying them out.

To many of you who hoped I would fall and make a fool of myself, well I'll just let you watch and see what happens. I think you may be laughing once or twice.

Enjoy

Now that I'm done playing on the internet, I think I'll actually go use them for a while



Youtube cut off my HEAD! Oh well, worst things have happened

Rollers

Last week I decided I was going to finally stop procrastinating buying rollers for my bike. What are rollers you may ask. Check them out here. 

I'm excited for them, there are a lot of training techniques you can practice on rollers like balance, as well as getting a really efficient riding technique.

I've promised a few people that I was going to videotape myself on my first time on the rollers, hopefully it will be highly entertaining. I just hope I'm not as bad as this guy.

Favorite Swim Workouts

There are two swim workouts I've done lately that I just love. I find them to be challenging, but at the same time really easy to fly through the distance without it being a chore.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the 15X100m set, but that can be hard to motivate yourself at times.

So the first one is take your 1500m race pace and add 15/10/5 seconds to that.
(For example, my race pace is 1:30/100m)

So your interval is
1:45/1:40/1:35 repeat.

What I like about this workout is that even though you are swimming hard the whole time, it feels almost like a fartlek workout. And instead of being 15X100 you think of it more as 5X300 broken up.

The second thing I like about this workout, and unfortunately unless you swim exactly my pace you won't enjoy it as much, is that those times add up exactly to 5 minutes, so its the same time on the clock every time. I just need to remember to leave on 

Red Top

Red 45

Red 25

Repeat Red Top.

The Second workout I really like doing, and I don't know what the name of it is, but every subsequent 100 has to be faster than the previous.

You make your interval time really easy, say 2:00/100m. This give ample time for recovery. 

Starting out, you swim the first 100 really slow focusing just on technique, ie; 1:55ish, should feel painfully slow. 

Then each 100 after that should be 1-2 seconds faster. 

The first 5-8 should be really easy but then you get down to the 130's and it gets a little bit more of a workout.

Once you hit #12-13 your now in the 1:20's and for me, this is getting into the red zone. 

Whats nice about this workout is that it teaches your to build by the end, and since you were focusing on technique for the first bunch, hopefully you should be swimming efficiently and strong. My goal for this one is to at least hit 15X100.

Anyways, thats all for now

Finally a new training update!

This week I finally got back in the pool. It was really difficult at first, but now that I'm a few days in its really great to start working out again. Every winter I go into a slump with my training, last years was nearly 4 month long. This year I knew that after the marathon I was going to be psychologically wiped, but didn't think it would hit me this hard. I haven't really tried running yet, but I still don't think my foot is back to par, I really need to get it checked out. The beauty of triathlon is that I can simply keep putting that off and focus on biking and swimming and there isn't TOO much loss.

Back to the pool.

I went back to my first swim with the club on Tuesday, and let me tell you, it was HARD. I was in terrible shape. Instead of swimming I was simply sinking. I felt like that mouse in the photo holding to the wall for dear life. At the end of race season I was comfortably holding 1:30/100 meters in all of my sets. This week going back, I was struggling to hit 1:30's high and sometimes edged above 1:40. I was skipping sets and doing my own thing. Turns out 6 weeks out of the pool can really do a number on your fitness.

With embarrassment in mind, I went swimming Wednesday over lunch. I wanted to get a good strong workout in, but my arms were so dead from Tuesday that I just sneaked in 1000 meters and called it a day.

Thursday I braved practice again which was 21X100 main set broken up into different paces. The end being 6X100 @ 1:35. This should have been an easy set, but I was just sneaking in around 1:33 and not getting nearly enough rest in those 2 seconds that I would have to skip again.

The plus side to this is that even though it was only two days, Tuesday to Thursday there was a drastic difference in my fitness.

I went swimming again today and did a 2.5k workout, and was finally comfortably able to make my sets on 1:35. It always surprises me how quickly it will come back. Sure I'm still a long way off from where I was in the summer, but I can consider this my build phase for the coming season, get some good ground work in. My goal for next summer is to hit 1:25/100 meters open water over 2k, this is quite a bit faster than I'm at today but with some effort I think it can come.

Anyways, off to sleep, on that note I'm going swimming in the morning. Going to try and get as much fitness in before I get fat and lazy over the holidays when I'm back home with Mom cooking for me! I can't wait!

Take it easy