April Meeting
WOW! We are FOUR MONTHS out from Ironman Canada! It is pretty unbelievable how much we have grown in the past five months. Each of us has learned more about ourselves and each of us has gained a level of physical fitness above where we have ever been. The things we are accomplishing are pretty unbelievable to us. Sitting here one week post Grand Canyon run talking about the next distance training day without feeling compromised is pretty crazy. We all feel at least 85% recovered from the past week's training and racing and feel ready to hit the next long distance training session.
The plan is to bike Epic two times. Andrea will leave at 3am and park Zizou at the start of the loop with a cooler with food and drink refills for the 2nd lap. Sonja, Anthony and Steve will leave from the house at 5am. The group is excited to get out on the bike and see what we are capable of after the previous week's activities. We are all impressed that we are excited about doing a 120-130 mile bike ride after our Grand Canyon adventure and that none of us feels hesitant or worried about the day in terms of feeling recovered or compromised. The loop is 67.4 miles long, give or take depending on where you start, and has 8029 feet of climbing. I pretty much stink at math, but I believe this makes us riding 134.8 miles and climbing 16,058 feet. TOO COOL!! (A map is included in the post if you want to check it out and give it a go sometime.) The ride is pretty cool and definitely challenging. The biggest challenge, we think, is going to be getting all the way down the mountain and turning around to do it all again. It will be a wild ride!
After discussing food and drink preparations for the ride we started discussing the fact that some might be viewing us as ultra runners, including ourselves, because of all of the long distance running we have been doing. However, we are not ultra runners or ultra athletes. We are just a group of triathletes getting ready for an Ironman race by doing "longer than Ironman distance" training events. Triathlon is our goal and passion. You might not believe this, but olympic distance races are our focus this year! In fact, USA Triathlon Age Group National Championships in Tuscaloosa Alabama is our KEY RACE this year. It is 8 days before Canada. And for Sonja and Anthony, ITU Age Group World Championships in Australia is a second KEY RACE 2 weeks after Canada. One of the questions we had at the beginning of this experiment was: "Can age group triathletes train long and race back to back? Can we maintain quality speed to be competitive in both shorter and longer distance races?" Professional athletes do this type of training all the time. In fact, Chris McDonald raced Ironman Louisville placing 2nd in 2008 and turned around and raced Ironman Wisconsin 1 week later and won it! One week. Although many told us we were crazy and that we would get injured and burnout we wanted to press forward and answer the question for ourselves.
After the past weekend at Rage in the Sage and turning around and running 47.8 miles in the Grand Canyon and being ready to do a 130 mile bike ride we are more convinced than ever that age group athletes are capable of doing this type of training, if it is done correctly. Ironically, at Rage in the Sage a Triathlete magazine (March 2009) was in the goody bag and one of the front page stories is "How to Over Train Effectively". I thought, how ironic, they are actually going to support what we are doing even though they are using the wrong term for it. In my opinion, this type of language is what gives the type of training we are doing a bad reputation. You cannot ever overtrain effectively, ever. The definition of overtraining is: "A decline in athletic performance caused by subjecting the body to more training stress than it can properly adapt to in a given period of time." The author of the article chose to use the term overtrain to catch your attention and very quickly changes the term overtraining to overreaching in the article, which is something you can do effectively. We are calling what we are doing extended distance training. Our experiment is designed to track our progress, results, and recovery with the goal of creating a base so huge that it not only changes our fitness level but that it changes our perception on our athletic ability. That is happening.
The craziest thing about this is that it is not our results at the previous race that supports our theory. It is our individual responses to this training. Each of us reports feeling stronger, faster, and capable of giving more when we previously would not have. Each of us is excited about the next opportunity to grow as an athlete. We have learned in extended distance training the training isn't the only thing that makes us better athletes. It is the rest days, the nutrition, the sleep, and all of the aspects of recovery that are just as important as the actual training events. When we feel compromised we change our goals for the day or take a rest day. We are paying attention to our moods and our other interests in an attempt to prevent staleness and burnout.
The month of May has us going our separate ways as we all have different commitments and aren't able to schedule too much time together. Anthony will race a half marathon in Lincoln Nebraska, Steve will head to Florida for 70.3 Florida, Andrea will run the Greenland 50K, and Sonja will race a trail marathon and participate in the Western States 100 training camp in California. Our 9000 meter swim got rescheduled for the 20th. We will not have to do this in the pool.....oh yippee! No counting laps! No flip turns, well maybe a couple at the shore just to be silly, and no chlorine!! We will be swimming 5 laps in the Gravel Pond. It will be very exciting to be in the open water. One thing I think we will have to be aware of is the temperature of the pond and getting cold.
All in all our performances, energy, desire, and lack of injury support we are headed in the right direction. We all feel incredibly fit and have learned about our nutritional and recovery needs the past 5 months. Our next race as a group is Kansas 70.3 on June 14th.
AW
The plan is to bike Epic two times. Andrea will leave at 3am and park Zizou at the start of the loop with a cooler with food and drink refills for the 2nd lap. Sonja, Anthony and Steve will leave from the house at 5am. The group is excited to get out on the bike and see what we are capable of after the previous week's activities. We are all impressed that we are excited about doing a 120-130 mile bike ride after our Grand Canyon adventure and that none of us feels hesitant or worried about the day in terms of feeling recovered or compromised. The loop is 67.4 miles long, give or take depending on where you start, and has 8029 feet of climbing. I pretty much stink at math, but I believe this makes us riding 134.8 miles and climbing 16,058 feet. TOO COOL!! (A map is included in the post if you want to check it out and give it a go sometime.) The ride is pretty cool and definitely challenging. The biggest challenge, we think, is going to be getting all the way down the mountain and turning around to do it all again. It will be a wild ride!
After discussing food and drink preparations for the ride we started discussing the fact that some might be viewing us as ultra runners, including ourselves, because of all of the long distance running we have been doing. However, we are not ultra runners or ultra athletes. We are just a group of triathletes getting ready for an Ironman race by doing "longer than Ironman distance" training events. Triathlon is our goal and passion. You might not believe this, but olympic distance races are our focus this year! In fact, USA Triathlon Age Group National Championships in Tuscaloosa Alabama is our KEY RACE this year. It is 8 days before Canada. And for Sonja and Anthony, ITU Age Group World Championships in Australia is a second KEY RACE 2 weeks after Canada. One of the questions we had at the beginning of this experiment was: "Can age group triathletes train long and race back to back? Can we maintain quality speed to be competitive in both shorter and longer distance races?" Professional athletes do this type of training all the time. In fact, Chris McDonald raced Ironman Louisville placing 2nd in 2008 and turned around and raced Ironman Wisconsin 1 week later and won it! One week. Although many told us we were crazy and that we would get injured and burnout we wanted to press forward and answer the question for ourselves.
After the past weekend at Rage in the Sage and turning around and running 47.8 miles in the Grand Canyon and being ready to do a 130 mile bike ride we are more convinced than ever that age group athletes are capable of doing this type of training, if it is done correctly. Ironically, at Rage in the Sage a Triathlete magazine (March 2009) was in the goody bag and one of the front page stories is "How to Over Train Effectively". I thought, how ironic, they are actually going to support what we are doing even though they are using the wrong term for it. In my opinion, this type of language is what gives the type of training we are doing a bad reputation. You cannot ever overtrain effectively, ever. The definition of overtraining is: "A decline in athletic performance caused by subjecting the body to more training stress than it can properly adapt to in a given period of time." The author of the article chose to use the term overtrain to catch your attention and very quickly changes the term overtraining to overreaching in the article, which is something you can do effectively. We are calling what we are doing extended distance training. Our experiment is designed to track our progress, results, and recovery with the goal of creating a base so huge that it not only changes our fitness level but that it changes our perception on our athletic ability. That is happening.
The craziest thing about this is that it is not our results at the previous race that supports our theory. It is our individual responses to this training. Each of us reports feeling stronger, faster, and capable of giving more when we previously would not have. Each of us is excited about the next opportunity to grow as an athlete. We have learned in extended distance training the training isn't the only thing that makes us better athletes. It is the rest days, the nutrition, the sleep, and all of the aspects of recovery that are just as important as the actual training events. When we feel compromised we change our goals for the day or take a rest day. We are paying attention to our moods and our other interests in an attempt to prevent staleness and burnout.
The month of May has us going our separate ways as we all have different commitments and aren't able to schedule too much time together. Anthony will race a half marathon in Lincoln Nebraska, Steve will head to Florida for 70.3 Florida, Andrea will run the Greenland 50K, and Sonja will race a trail marathon and participate in the Western States 100 training camp in California. Our 9000 meter swim got rescheduled for the 20th. We will not have to do this in the pool.....oh yippee! No counting laps! No flip turns, well maybe a couple at the shore just to be silly, and no chlorine!! We will be swimming 5 laps in the Gravel Pond. It will be very exciting to be in the open water. One thing I think we will have to be aware of is the temperature of the pond and getting cold.
All in all our performances, energy, desire, and lack of injury support we are headed in the right direction. We all feel incredibly fit and have learned about our nutritional and recovery needs the past 5 months. Our next race as a group is Kansas 70.3 on June 14th.
AW
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