Taper

We are in the heart of race season.  Folks have been working hard for months.  Now races are upon us which means taper's.

So what is a taper anyway?  Under high intensities (high zone work, hard work...), your muscles accumulate a lot of damage.  The harder you work, the more damage. Of course, this is the idea behind the hard blocks.  But speed is developed in the recovery phase as your body heals and adapts to the hard work.  The idea behind a race taper is to get the body fully healed from the high intensity work while maintaining fitness going into a race.  So, typically you see a dramatic drop off in intensity and sometimes volume (although many argue volume may need to stay high).  The taper time varies by training program, age, intensity levels, athlete levels (pros tend to take less taper while a weekend warrior may need more as they heal slower).

Of course, for a taper to be good you need to actually taper.  So many athletes get caught up in worrying about how slow they are going during taper.  But speed needs to be put on the back burner.  I like to see athletes in Z1/2 during a lot of taper work.  Yep, you will be going slow.  So what?  You have already done the work.  You are not going to get faster by pushing the HR up.  You are going to RACE faster by healing/recovering.  Settle down there type A personality.  Sometimes to go fast, you have to go slow...

What I find most interesting is how you feel during taper.  It is quite common to feel like hell.  As the body figures out it has time to heal instead of saving up for another hard effort, all kinds of chemical processes are kicked off. A lot of 'junk' is released from the cells to be cleaned out of the body. And these processes take a lot of energy (and water).  So, you may actually feel somewhat more tired and worse then your hard weeks.  Strange, but this is how it goes.  You can become un-confident.  Settle down camper.  This is just how it goes.  You may get slower than you expect.  But this is in fact what you should expect.  It is tough with short course.  But much worse with an IM taper which can take weeks and make you really feel like hell.

The trick is to show up race day healed.  Rested.  Hydrated.  Ready.  And fast.  So, TAPER.  Don't do stupid things race week thinking you will get faster.  Reel it back in.  Relax. Enjoy the extra time.  And go have your best race!

Strange things...

You are preparing for long course racing (half IM or IM).  You are working hard, doing more hours, and doing more volume.  Many folks are training harder then they have ever in their lives.  This can make your body react in strange ways.

One is heat.  Specifically, your body heat.  You may find that your legs are quite hot quite often.  Or that you sweat for long periods of time after training.  After hard work, your body will begin to repair itself.  The repair process is an exothermic chemical reaction.  In other words, it generates heat.  So, muscle tissue getting hot to repair should not be surprising.  The key things to do about this are:

1. Nothing.  It is normal.
2. Drink more.  The reactions require a lot of water so you will need to replace it.  Also, it helps lower body temperature.
3. Ice.  Ice baths are great to help the healing process and lower heat.  Too much heat can damage the recovery process.  Ice packs work also if the ice bath is too much for you.

You may also experience night sweats.  This is the body working hard to recover.  Again, cooling and drinking are important.  And a towel close to the bed may help :-).

So, don't be surprised if strange things happen.  As your fitness increases, these episodes will decrease.  However ice is always your friend so use it often.

Diet vs. Nutrition

I had a good conversation with an Athlete the other day  I saw her at IM FL and was surprised to see her much heavier then I would have thought.  Speaking with this 3x IM many months later I connected the dots.  She had been told to eat freely and use junk to race as nutrition.  No wonder this former Fitness competitor was pounds overweight for this race.

In endurance sports, weight is speed.  Or specifically, less weight is speed.  This is a function of Diet.  Your diet is what you eat day to day.  Your meals.  This has NOTHING to do with training/racing nutrition.  For your diet, you need to cut bad fats way down.  As I say, if it is shiny don't eat it.  Cut sugars out.  Cheese?  Sorry.  Diet planning is a longer conversation but the keys are to eat clean, eat enough, and stay balanced.  Leverage Diet for recovery and weight loss.

Nutrition is what you take in during training and racing.  This can involve large amounts of sugars, caffeine, and salt.  Things that do not appear in your Diet.  Under work loads, the body manages nutrition differently and for different reasons.  Shorting working Nutrition will just inhibit your training and encourage your body to story fat for your next workout.  If your IM nutrition is wrong (too much or too little) you go from a good marathon run to a hellish marathon walk.  What sounds better to you?

Both topics involve a much more detailed conversation, but from this you get the idea.  Plan your Diet and Nutrition plan for success.

Searching for speed

I get a lot of questions from athletes looking for more speed:

• Will race wheels make me faster?
• Will an aero helmet make me faster?
• Will the new _______ shoe make me faster?
• I got the newest ______________ to be faster.
• I am going to take product x to be faster.
• Will product y make me faster?

Notice the thing that is missing in this list: Will training hard and hitting all of my workouts on my plan make me faster?  This is the only item I would answer yes to.

People will spend $300 to reduce the weight of their bike pedals by 100g, but will not skip a burger lunch that may take 100g off their waist.  Athletes will skip workout after workout on a plan, and avoid the tough days, but will insist race wheels will make them faster.  There is no replacement for work.

I concede, there is one place you can buy speed: a wetsuit.  This piece of equipment can make a big difference and the more expensive suits can help make bigger jumps.  But if you are only swimming 1500m per swim, even a good suit won't help.  So even this equipment is dependent on WORK.

I have seen what one of the fastest amateur cyclist's in the US does to get faster for Half IM distances.  It is not complex.  He goes hard.  Real hard.  Z4 for long periods of time.  Turns amazing shades of red and purple.  Does not let up.  Gets the work done.  Period.  No pill.  No gear.  No fad diet.  Simple, plan, hard work.  When you see others make jumps in performance, I bet if you sneak in to see their workouts you may see the same work ethic.

So stop making excuses.  Stop trying a new gadget.  That pill may help, or it may just be a waste of money.  What I can assure you is that if you are willing to work hard, push yourself, tolerate some pain, and keep going then you will get faster.  If you cannot do this, do not expect to get faster no matter how much you spend.

Executing a long run

There is more to a good long run then just going out and running.  This assumes you want to get faster on long runs...

Long runs, when working on speed, should be fast.  You should work hard.  However, you don't have to jump up to pace from mile one.  In fact, if you are in a big block you may find it takes 3 miles to get up to full speed.  You may not even want to start the run as you may be sore and tired from the previous days of work.

The approach I recommend involves a through warm-up, slow build, then a fast finish with a magic mile.  No matter how fast you are, your warm-up should be at a slow pace.  Don't start hammering from the start.  You may even start in Z1 and stay there for 3 miles or so on a 10 mile run.  As you warm up, your legs will loosen up.  They will feel lighter.  Your HR will stabilize.  You will begin to feel better.  This is the time to begin to increase effort (and hence speed).  Slowly, mile by mile, increase your HR.  Don't be in a hurry.  By about halfway through the run you should be in the correct zone.  You can continue to drift up as long as you stay under control.  Each mile a bit more intense then the last.  Then the next to last mile, let'er rip.  Drop the hammer.  Float up to Z3 or Z4 at a pace you can hold for the entire mile.  This should be tough.  This is the magic mile.  When this is done, you are on your cool-down mile.  Speed is not important.  Getting back to your car/house is.  You can walk some, but keep moving.  Get back to a very slow jog pace and shake the legs back out.  Recovery for your next workout begins here.

This approach teaches pacing, control, and mimics the effort on a half or full IM race.  Your HR in these races will drift up and effort will go up.  Bad news is that in an IM, you will probably be slowing down.  But you will have the experience of drifting, being aware of it, and managing it.  The magic mile is all about knowing that things can be worse and that if needed you may have more energy in the tank at the end then you think.

So, take it slow.  Be patient.  Be under control.  Drink a lot, don't forget food (gels), and keep salt in mind.  Race smart and you will be fast!

How to execute Speedwork

If you train to go slow, you will race slow.  No matter what the distance.  If you train hard and go fast, you are more likely to go fast at a race.

A coach may use speed to manage your speed work, but at the end of the day fast for you is what will put you in the correct zone for speed work.  This is typically Z4 or higher.  One person's fast is a 10 min mile.  Another is a 5 min mile.  But both are probably in Z4+.  If you get caught up in another's pace and try to hit it, you will blow up.  The fastest athletes do what they are supposed to do, not what they want to do.

There are a lot of reasons to do speed work and I will deal with that in another article.  This article is about HOW to do speed work.

Obviously speed work means going hard.  Hard means it hurts.  You breathe hard.  You challenge your limits.  But there is more detail to well executed work.  Endurance sports are all about pacing.  And speed work is a great place to practice this.  Yes, you need to be in Z4, but not from the first second.

Like all of your work, it is good to ease into the speed of your work.  Know that your HR will drift up to the right zone shortly.  DO NOT accelerate hard to get up to speed in a few feet.  Accelerate in a managed, smooth fashion.  Don't jump to max speed too quickly.  Speed up, settle in, then add a bit more speed to refine hitting the target zone for the workout.  Typically, you should be fastest at the end of an interval, not the start.  Be under control and manage pace to something you can hold for the entire interval.

The idea is to teach control even when working hard.  This does not mean sit up.  But be smooth.  Get to speed under control.  Get to a speed you can hold and be in zone.  Don't sprint at a pace you can't hold.  And don't bury yourself in the first 30 seconds so the average speed of the interval is lower than what it could be.

Train smart.  Train fast.  And get faster.

Warming up and Cooling down

Most workouts include a warm-up and cool-down to them.  What surprises me is how athletes interpret these.

To get the body to full power, it needs to start functioning.  It warms up not unlike a car.  The operating temperature for optimum chemical reactions needs to be built up.  Sugar needs to start flowing.  And the stiffness from the last workout needs be managed.  This can take long distance athletes 30 minutes.  There is no need during this time to worry about speed.  It is all about getting up to power.  GO SLOW.  Zone 1 is fine.  Often when I warm up for my runs I start at just below 10 minute miles.  On my speed days, I can take 1.5 miles of running before I try an interval.  There is no hurry.

Cool-down is also important.  I don't really think you 'cool down', but you do operate the engine at a slower speed.  This allows you to move some of the bad molecules you generate during work out of the cells.  It physically makes things move which helps clear out 'junk'.  Water is flushed through your system cleaning out cells.  Finally, muscles that may have tightened up get a chance to loosen up again.  But SPEED IS NOT IMPORTANT.  Your cool-down mile can be 40% slower then your on power running/riding/swimming.  Take your time.  Relax.  Your work is done.  This is the first step to recovery for your next workout.  And if  I hear you tell me about how fast your cool-down was don't be surprised if you get a bad reaction out of me!

So, take the time to get the machine up to speed before doing the work.  Then take the time to clean the machine out after the work.