Thursday was a busy day, to say the least.
Thursday I had an appointment with Neil Henderson of the
I’ve known for a long time that I had been doing the bulk of my running too hard and too fast and I had cut it back for that reason. The problem is, I wasn’t sure if I had cut it back far enough. Have I still been training too hard? Not hard enough? This was a question I couldn’t answer myself and I felt I needed an answer to. Normally the wait on testing is about a month, which was fine with me. When I called, I was in luck, someone had cancelled an appointment for a couple days from then.
I got to BCSM with my pedals and bike shoes and Paul got me all set up on the bike they use. There was a fan in front of me, a water bottle and towels, a TV set to VS. for le Tour de France and a whole bunch of machines on my right. The first was a computer giving a readout of everything that was going on with the bike. Watts, cadence, average cadence, gear ratio, speed, etc. That was about where my understanding of the equipment ended. I warmed up at 60 watts for 20 minutes and Paul took my blood by sticking my finger and drawing off the blood into a tiny little straw.
He then bumped the machine up by 20 watts and went to test the sample. Every four minutes after that Paul would bump the bike up 20 watts, stick my finger (the same finger each time, which was very sore by the end of the day) draw blood and test it. We stopped at 200 watts for a cool down and for Paul and Neal Henderson to start the analysis.
I finished, changed and showered in the locker room, then went to meet with Neal to discuss the data. Neal showed me a sample chart and explained what it all meant and how I could use the information to improve my training. Finally, Neal showed me my own chart.
To give an idea of where I’m coming from and how much I was over training, I have been doing most of my recent training running at 141-151bpm and cycling at 131-141bpm. This was what I was doing the vast amount of my work at. I had been running in the 150-160 range for a long time and cut it back to 141-151 based on a calculator I found on the internet.
Neal showed me my numbers and said that based on my results, he would guess I was training right here, and he pointed at the 135bpm area, which was pretty much dead on. That area is in my endurance zone, which sounds like a good thing at first, but as he explained it, it’s in a nether region that’s too hard to effectively build endurance and too easy to be of much use as speed work. There is a place for that level of training in a well built plan, but it’s not where the massive bulk of training should be done. Instead, close to 75% of my bike training should be in the 117-125bpm range, 15bpm lower than I was training (yikes!).
I asked how this data would translate to my running, especially since I had been running much longer than I had been biking. Typically, 8-12 beats difference would be standard, maybe 15 for someone who was a good runner and a new biker so I should be running at about 130-140 rather than the 141-151 I had been at and a far cry from the 150-160 I used to train with!
Most of the rest of the consultation was spent going over examples of athletes who train this way… Olympians, Xterra Champions, marathon legends, Tour de France cyclists… as Neal said, if there was a way to better train these athletes, he would use it and they would train with it, but there isn’t and the research and evidence all proves this is the way to go. Easily 75% of the people he sees train too hard, like I do. 10% or so of the people he sees train right because they have a smart coach or listened to someone they respect and the other ~15% train right because they’ve already been to see someone like him and finally got it through their heads. Slowing down is a difficult thing to do. It makes sense in my head that to race faster, I need to train faster. What I’m not thinking is that to race hard, I need to train easy. As he said and I quoted above, it only matters how fast you go when you pin your number on. If I’m racing my training runs, all I’m doing is shooting myself in the foot.
Test Results:
Watts : RPE : HR : Lactate (millimols)
60 : 2.5 : 110 : 1.33
80 : 3.0 : 115 : 1.26
100 : 3.0 : 120 : 1.63
120 : 3.5 : 125 : 1.77
140 : 4.0 : 134 : 1.99
160 : 5.0 : 145 : 3.09
180 : 6.5 : 153 : 4.50
200 : 8.5 : 160 : 6.63
My Lactate Threshold (LT) on the bike is 175watts/150bpm so my run LT is probably about 160-165bpm.
Recovery Pace 5-10% of weekly training
Bike <117bpm/90watts Run <127bpm
Overdistance Pace 50-75% of weekly training – Optimal Zone for base fitness, fatigue resistance and endurance
Bike 117-125bom/90-120watts Run 127-135bpm
Endurance 20-30% of weekly training – improves oxygen delivery and aerobic breakdown of carbs, fat and lactate
Bike 125-142bpm/120-155watts Run 135-152bpm
Tempo/LT 0-10% of weekly mileage – Improves ability to maintain high race pace
Tempo Bike 145-150bpm/165-175watts Run 152-162bpm
LT Bike 150-158bpm/175-190watts Run 162-170bpm
VO2Max 0-2% of weekly training – improves heart stroke voume and lactate clearance
Bike >159bpm/>195watts Run >170bpm
Zinn and the Art of Triathlon Bikes: Aerodynamics, Bike Fit, Speed Tuning and Maintenance
Colorado Multisport hosted a book launch party for Lennard Zinn’s new book. Zinn, I discovered, is a
It was a somewhat small event, very informal with snacks and drinks and, of course, the new book and Lennard. I spent some time talking with one of the marketers for the publisher, about triathlon, training and the kind of work he does as well as the guy who runs the bike frame manufacturing for Lennard. I don’t know much about bikes, hardly anything to be completely honest. I think part of what I love about running is the simplicity of it, while the complexity of bicycling has an appeal as well; it’s not something I’m familiar with yet. I also got a chance to talk with Lennard Zinn himself, though with my short breadth of cycling knowledge, I was mostly doing my best to be a good listener and learn as much as I could from what he said. I got a copy of his book, which he was gracious enough to sign as well and from what I’ve read so far, it has been very informative.
S&S #5
Before going to the Zinn event, there was the small matter of Stroke & Stride #5. Because I wanted to get to the Zinn event, I again did the 750m swim. It was a fairly unremarkable race although I had a nice duel the last 50-100m of the run with a guy who passed me. After he passed, I sped up to try and re-pass him, he turned briefly and saw me trying to catch him (I wasn’t more than a couple feet behind), and accelerated as well, causing me to try to step it up an additional notch with us both ultimately hitting it as hard as we could, which the crowd picked up on and gave us a nice cheer for our efforts. Unfortunately, I was not triumphant, but it was close and we congratulated each other, chests heaving to suck in oxygen.
My times were pretty much in line with last week, in fact, my swim time and transition time were exactly the same but I lost 15 seconds on the run. Next week I think I’m going to take the week off from the S&S. I’m not entirely sure yet, but I think this will be the week I take off, I feel slightly burnt out on the race so a week off seems smart.
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