Coach P's June 2015 Training Update (Hawaii Block 1)
A Transitional Month
What started off as a return to training plan, with lots of really good intent, quickly devolved into a month of just fun. As you can see from the photos online, I had a lot of catching up to do with the family, and with summer here there are no more excuses! Outside of the Lake Placid Training Camp in mid-June (an annual tradition!), it was a month focused on a few key areas. Training totals from Strava weren't very exciting:
- Swim - 11 total times.
- Bike - 15 total rides.
- Run - 19 total runs.
The Swim
My focus for June was on technique. I know I need to swim better overall, and usually my swim training is just time in the water. More of an aerobic building exercise than a "How can I get faster?" exercise. I did some reading, and thinking and video seeking. I am a very visual learner, so I really enjoy cruising YouTube to find some quality stuff to watch.
- Super relaxed swimming with fixed head position: Jono Van Hazel
- Swimming with higher legs: Funny, but good instruction.
- Cross Over Kick: Reading, not watching.
I have been working on a relaxed stroke with better kick timing. A full stroke with my finish coming through my hip. Interestingly, my 100 times are easily sub 1:25 with this approach, where just working on faster turnover / cadence had me practically exhausted without the speed. I plan on continuing this focus as I build endurance.
The Bike
I have been on my road bike all month and have really been loving it. Not a great machine for the longer rides, but in general I have kept things as short as I could. Many 30 mile / 1 hour 20 minute efforts. I also kicked off a concerted effort to ride as much Always Be Pushing / Zone 3 effort as possible.
The result has been a consistent stretch of rides all over 300 watts Normalized Power, usually over 22 mph on my road bike. Super excited about this, as it's been great to watch even though I spend most rides wanting to throw up.
There was a volume pop at the Placid camp where I actually set some PBs on my road bike (not tri!), but it was tough riding the road bike for that long!
I am looking forward to returning to my P5 and getting some good aero time.
The Run
Similar to the bike, I have been pushing the runs. Most of them have been sub-6:40 pace, with two 10 mile efforts at 6:32 and 6:34 pace as well. The running has been awesome; like the bike there's a sweet pace that's easy to fall into...even though it hurts like I am in a human vice. It's been fun to push, but the overall mileage has been pretty low, so I will need to begin to work on building that back up.
The Cost of Intensity
My left knee has been feeling it...I guess if you never stop putting torque on the pedals your body is going to push back. It's nothing too serious, but I need to back off to allow it to heal and give myself time to recover between the super quality sessions. I believe it's Patellafemoral Syndrome, so lots of work on my hips and dorsiflexion as I hammer on that quad with self care.
Next Steps
As I head into July, I plan to get back to a more basic schedule. Similar to my typical training build but not all in with the work. I am still getting back to the volume but I have to exit the short/intense training period that I just finished up. My goals are straightforward:
- Continue working the swim, getting in 4 sessions a week.
- Get back on the TT bike and continue to push the rides fairly hard...no serious volume this time outside of the week I will be in Lake Placid to support the Team and give our free Four Keys Race Execution talk.
- I will get back to 4 solid runs a week and build up to sitting on 30 miles a week...the intensity will have to drop a bit b/c of the volume (and summer heat) but I will see what I can do to keep some quality in there.
Thanks for reading and for all of your support!
Comments
Great work so far, P. Heal that knee.
Coach Rich and I chatted for a while about swim stroke rate. At his local swim clinics, he has the group do some intervals at different cadences to, in part, prove the point that everyone eventually turns over too fast, with bad form, and they actually produce diminishing returns and get slower. The Ramp Test does the same thing: when I did 20x50's starting at 55spm or so and moving up 1 every 50yds until I got near 75spm, I found that my fastest 50s were 62, 63, and 64spm. Faster than 64, the times got slower even though I was turning over more often. The goal is to find that sweet spot where you're not overgliding (wasting unused momentum) but also not flailing meat hooks in the water. When I first settled on 63spm, I could hold that for 50 and 100 pretty easy, but 200 was brutal. Like you, I found it exhausting and didn't know if it was really a positive solution. But if Jodie Swallow can hold a ridiculous 90spm over 2.4 miles (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiNkAMU8syI), then surely I could hold a paltry 63. And, sure enough, after several weeks, 60-63 became my more normal stroke rate and I found I could hold it over 300s and eventually 500s. And although my 50 and 100 times didn't seem much faster than before, my 300 and 500 times were WAY faster than when I was swimming them at 48spm. My point: if you recently jacked your stroke rate up by 5 or even 10 spm, there's a muscular adjustment period. The key, though, is finding that sweet spot (which you may already have), then extending it over longer distances through hard work. IMO.
The Jono video showcased a couple of good points. First, he's a 6' 2", lanky-limbed Olympic freak of nature who's probably swam 4 million miles in the pool since he was 3yo - so take anything he does with a grain of salt because we're never going to do what he does. Second, he kicks a ton and probably gets 10% of his speed from his legs - tri geeks should probably get 1-2% in a no-wet suit swim. Third, his speed most definitely increased with his stroke rate, and he is clearly showcasing his many different gears - pretty awesome to watch. He swims smoothly at 50spm and at 95spm. If you swim 4x/wk and do lots of work ~1:28/100 (or whatever your current TP is) with a great spm for you, I have no doubt that you will get faster.
One of the good spinoffs from the Jono video is it (or, his stroke) is the model for the Mr. Smooth app on the swim smooth site. If you haven't seen it, it is a downloadable animation that lets you change camera angle, speed, etc etc to break down what's going on behind all that smoothness. I watch it for a few minutes before I head out to the pool, and serves as a great reminder or highlight of certain points of focus.
Oh - and keep kicking ass, coach P!
have you used the swimming with higher legs guidance with good results or is that something you are going to try? My legs sink quickly and I've been instructed to work on my kick as way to keep better balance.
The Swim Smooth coaches have this information:
The most common causes of poor body position (and low sinky legs) are:
Holding your breath
A high-lifting head to breathe
Looking too far forward in the water
Kicking from the knee
Scissor kick
Dorsi-flexed ankles
Under-kicking
Poor core stabilisation
Pressing down on the water during the catch
Poor hip flexibility
I think I also have issues with breathing and poor ankle flexibility.
Any advice you could offer would be greatly appreciated!
1. Back when I could actually swim, and before that when I was a coach to (very) young AG swimmers, I put a LOT of emphasis on the end of the swim stroke. One thing I kept in mind was to (attempt to) have my hand move through the water at an increasing speed throughout the length of the stroke, with the fastest part being that last little push past the hips. That sounds a bit like your emphasis on "A full stroke with my finish coming through my hip."
2. Something that helped me this winter when I was having endless difficulty with Patella-femoral syndrome in both knees - associated with trying to alternate between downhill skiing and OS 3x a week bike intervals - was a simple set of exercises.
https://youtu.be/p9jUpr7j0Tg I would do 3 x 10-15 of these exercises, along with 3 sets of single leg knee bends. Within about a month, the pains I'd been having in my knees were gone. By the time I got to my Retül bike fit in Boulder, the guy was gushing about how stable and straight my up and down knee action was. - minimal to no lateral movement.