Winter ‘Base’ Training

So the race season is done… you have had your 2-3 weeks off and enjoyed your full recovery… so now what? Straight back to hard training as you do not want to lose all your hard earned work over the year and not take a step back in fitness and speed?

First off it would take too much time and many pages to describe what actually to do over the winter months… as a Master Coach for TrainingBible.co.uk I think Joe Friel describes the key phases of training for endurance athlete’s perfectly in his TrainingBible books.

If you need to know how to break down your whole season into the correct key phases of training to get detailed structure of the types of energy systems you need to work on and how to prepare for a key race, then buy the Cyclists’s TrainingBible 4th edition if you are a cyclist / road racer or sportive rider, and if you are a triathlete then purchase the Triathlete’s TrainingBible. Both fantastic resources and a wealth of knowledge.

If you are like myself and looking to know exactly what you should do more so in each session and want a more detailed approach as a top age group athlete and want to perform at your best, then I highly recommend Joe Friel’s new book Your Best Triathlon: Advanced Training For Serious Athlete’s.

The key of the first part of your winter training is about full recovery… that means allowing your body to fully recover from the many months of arduous training and racing so that you can regenerate, repair and get stronger again. Sure you will lose a little fitness over the 2-3 weeks off proper training and maybe put on a few pounds… but this is good! You cannot keep so lean 12 months of the year as your immune, hormonal and muscular system will simply be too stretched. So embrace the few weeks after the recovery period and then start to find your training groove again. This next period is called your preparation period (preparing your body to train).

During the preparation period you are trying to get some easy to moderate activity / exercise in again and simply training as consistently as you can. Finding a nice rhythm and pattern each week that feels comfortable with your working, family, social and domestic schedule. You also have to consider that over this period you will probably have Christmas and New Year celebrations to content with to so why not let your hair down, eat well and be happy with family and friends, train little and often and relax with no fear of losing fitness, speed, strength etc… you will! I cannot emphasise this enough… embrace this fact that you need to take a few steps back in order to advance many steps forwards over the next 5-6 months… Yes 5 months! It’s December now… 4 weeks preparation training takes you to January… then that leaves 5-6 months until the start of the season for most in May – June! Almost half a year!

Obviously you don’t want to lose all your race fitness and speed from the season so you don’t just train easy volume… many think winter base training is about low intensity, moderate volume training that is slow in comparison to your race training in summer… of course it will be! But… doesn’t mean you can’t add the components of speed and strength to your training such as:

• GOLF swimming in the pool (add stroke count & time over 50m, aiming for best score) on lane times (30sec rest approx)
• High arm turnover sprints over 25m with 45sec recovery
• Short race pace threshold swims of 100m off 30sec
• Swimming with paddles to develop upper body strength and catch awareness of your stroke
• Pulling work with a pull-buoy, paddles, band (or mix of 1, 2 or 3 of these… try band only over 25m!)
• Single leg cadence drills on bike to develop a more efficient / economical pedal action
• Fast ‘spin up’s’ above race cadence over 20-60sec off same time recovery at 20-30rpm slower
• Over geared strength work in aero position at 55-60rpm but at aerobic heart rates (try 5x5min off 2min at 80rpm)
• Try pushing a large gear (52/53 x 12-15) over rolling terrain keeping heart rate aerobic
• Accelerations 10rpm above normal race cadence, then 10rpm below normal race cadence, aerobic effort
• Running strides over 20secs or 100m fast and relaxed off 40sec walk recovery
• Short hill reps over 10sec on grass off walk down recovery
• Running drills (high knees, butt flicks, hops on one leg, skips for height, fast feet etc…)

With so many technical and speed skill related exercises you can implement into many of your normal easy to steady sessions you should never get bored, and you will slowly build your ability carefully so that your race pace training in the build phase in 12weeks onwards are handled without fatigue or breaking the body down as you will have become more resilient, more durable and simply more stronger to deal with anything that your throw at it. Should you not spend this valuable time training your base level of fitness then you are compromising your ability to take your body to that ‘next level’.

I know we are not elite / professional athletes, but we can learn a lot from them. Most top professional athletes will be now getting back to basics and building their base level of fitness again… but with many years of this behind them their base training will be longer and harder than yours! So always think about how many hours you can dedicate to your training each and every week. Spend more time in your base zones with minimal lactate threshold and anaerobic zones for now, then when you are in your build phase and preparing your body for the demands of racing, you can unleash all this fury, energy and harnessed strength with more specific, faster sessions… but now your body will be able to resist fatigue and recover quicker!

Here is what Joe Friel recommends with regards to the amount of training one should be doing during the base phase. Please note the chart is based on power showing actual output of work… heart rate is input or intensity but doesn’t tell you what work is being done (power, speed, pace etc…).

Joe says:

“While this is a power chart, for running a pace distribution chart would look like this also. If you only have a heart rate monitor then it would be the same sort of distribution. The problem with heart rate is you don’t know what you are accomplishing since you aren’t measure output. Unfortunately, all heart rate tells you is input, which is similar to effort. You don’t win races on based on effort (input). Everyone is trying hard. You win them on pace or power (output). Knowing both input and output makes training multi-dimensional.

Keeping a watchful eye on your intensity distribution, as with this chart, is very effective at this time in the season. It keeps you focused on what’s important. If you are in the early stages of your training season then now is not the time to be doing race-intensity workouts. There’s plenty of time for that later on in the build period. The most basic ability for an endurance athlete is aerobic endurance and now is when you should be developing it.”

Check out Joe Friels fantastic blog:

My New ULTIMATESWIM Book!

http://www.blurb.com/assets/embed.swf?book_id=2536362&locale=en_US

ULTIMATE SWIM by MARK TICKNER | Make Your Own Book

How To Gain More Time For Training!

• Stop reading this blog!

It is amazing in this internet age how much time we dedicate to sitting at your computer, mobile phone or electronic gadget that can upload your thoughts, feeling sand emotions! A little sum of time spent posting on your favourite training / information forum for instance makes startling reading!

• Stop posting too much on forums!

Let’s say you post regularly on a forum. Maybe you posted 500 posts over the year.

Let’s say it takes 2mins to write a small post, that makes 500 x 2min of your time = 1000min = 16hrs!

How about if it takes 5min per post (to log in, add post, click out) = 500 x 5min = 42hrs!

What about if you post 1000 times in a year at 2min = 33hrs!

1000 x 5min per post = 83hrs!

• Stop living on facebook!

Let’s look at facebook!!!

Some of you athlete’s / fitness enthusiasts could spend minutes, sometimes hours looking, posting, reading, reviewing at posts, videos, pictures, photos… the list is endless!

No-one cares what you ate for breakfast (unless your a World Champion / Olympic Gold Medallist… then it’s just plain interesting to see what champions eat!)… or what your religious background is or what quotes from famous people you can come up with that don’t even resemble who YOU are as a person!

Just say 30min a day (being VERY conservative here!) over a year based on 5 days a week (and I know some of you may say ‘I don’t log in that much’… reality check… be honest with yourselves… probably more like 5-7 days a week right if you have the chance!).

30min a day x 350 days a year = 175hrs a year (conservative estimate right?).

Add the time on facebook and forums up and your looking at a possible 200hrs of training time you could have done!

However, we want to catch up with friends, family etc… right? And ‘have a life’! So maybe halve that amount and you have a good guideline of the potential training you could have been doing rather than posting on forums, reading training books, asking people, trying to find what training to do!

100hrs of extra training is a substantial amount of time that is easily the difference between being a good age grouper and a top performing age grouper. Or doing a good Ironman time and a great Ironman time.

Whilst I can’t tell you individually what to do, I have seen so many times when I do post on forums to help others that there are many postees that have 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 posts or more and all trying to get that golden ticket or nugget of information.

STOP! Get out there and do something, raise your pulse, build a sweat, swim, bike, run, walk, lift weights, commute to / from work, play on a trampoline with your kids… whatever it is you do, do it for the love of it and stop wasting your life building varicose veins staring at a screen and trying to think up ways or get people how to train… in the words of a rather famous sportswear company… JUST DO IT!!!

My New Book Available Now… Finally! – ULTIMATESWIM

Finally… after 5years or more my new book entitled ‘UltimateSwim’ is now back from the printers and now available to buy from the fantastic online BLURB bookstore. Check it out here:  http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2536362

The idea behind the book was simple… as a top age group / elite triathlete I was always in search of what training session to do and scoured many training books, a back log of over 9 years of coaching plans given to me by 3 excellent triathlon coaches, numerous forums, online resources etc… always searching for that golden nugget swimming session that would keep me ‘entertained’, keep things ‘fun’ and make me ultimately faster in the water so I would perform at my best.

Over the years I logged each session, fine tuned them for my time available and my fitness level, then began coaching them to the athlete’s / members at HorshamAmphibiansTriathlon and it was here after coaching for close to 12 years that I decided I would write my own swimming training manual to help others in their pursuit of the ‘ultimate’ swimming manual.

I found that many fantastic training manuals were out there from well respected coaches and organisations but they never really told you exactly ‘how to’ or ‘what to’ do in each swim session! This became frustrating to be told that I should swim for 1hour of endurance based training, or do some strength work in the pool, or race pace intervals… yet never really told me exactly how far, what pace, how hard, how much rest etc… I should be doing. What use was that!?

The ULTIMATESWIM training manual helps to take away these fears and questions by telling you exactly how far, how fast, how much rest etc… and you can fine tune this based on your fitness, time available and when you have others in the pool faster or slower than you.

I hope the ULTIMATESWIM training manual can help you realise your goals and simply give you that spark of inspiration the next time you are swimming or coaching at the pool or open water!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bontrager 24/12 MTB event

After 20 years in triathlon it was time for me to take a ‘gap year’ in racing and have some fun competing in events I would never normally do. Such as the http://www.twentyfour12.com/ MTB event held over 24hrs. I entered as a 4 man relay team to have a little fun and with a bunch of my best buddies and training partners as we would all be of equal ability. Being of a ‘mature’ age and now in the veterans category we thought surely there can’t be many as fit as us, so thought we would be good for a podium place. I mean come on, we are all seasoned veterans of triathlon having posted very fast 9-9 1/2hr Ironman times and all gone under 5hrs for the 112 mile bike split. Who could top that!? (more on this later!).

Me on my 6th and last leg! Photo courtesy of ‘snapperchick’!

Without going into too much detail and giving you, the reader, the how’s and why’s we achieved 3rd place and not first place as a certain member of our team was adamant that we would win… here is a small list of what I learnt!

• MTB is NOT about fitness if you want to ride fast over very hilly and technical terrain!
• There will always be fat blokes over taking you on the fast technical descents!
• You will always get your revenge on said ‘fat bloke’ as you power past on the ascents!
• Tree roots CANNOT be ridden over fast when wet… no matter what the elites say and do!
• No matter how fast you think you are… you can always gain time perfecting your technical and descending talent!
• Ego goes out the window!
• Your 9hr Ironman time means NOTHING!
• Never let a chunky 13stone bloke use your bike the lap before all yours (when he broke his bike on his 1st lap!)
• At least my running prowess came to the fore when my chain snapped 3km up in the hills… at midnight in the dark!
• A Spinner® bike is the perfect warm up and cool down tool on events even though we got funny looks!
• Never forget your wellies!
• Never forget to take your own food when ‘white food’ is king at the event (do event organisers not realise we are athlete’s and need ‘real’ food to gain and sustain our energy… how about something brown or green in colour!).
• Exposure lights are awesome! http://www.exposurelights.com/ Thank you for lighting my way!
• Above all… keep smiling! No matter how tired or how fatigued you are… just think of the 24hr SOLO riders! They looked like they were on another planet from fatigue! Ironman… PAH!

Me and 'Da Boyz' on the podium (we are the 4 reprobates on the left in casual clothes as we had no team kit!) - Photo courtesy of 'snapperchick'!

An awesome event that now completed I think could use a little taming. Although the course was very hilly and very technical, so many people were walking which kind of defeated the purpose of the event… to have fun and enjoy the ride. Many were out of their talent, comfort zone and skill level which the organisers should address. Maybe 2 different courses next time… one for the ‘fun’ teams and another longer challenging one for the ‘extreme’ athlete’s.

Would I do again… most definitely YES! I would recommend any MTB team event to those looking for something a little different and unique that helps bonds riders and friends and get fit and challenge yourself in the process.

Night riding

Is it me or is there something magical about night riding… or riding on quiet country lanes with your lights on? That’s what I feel as I rode back from coaching the HorshamAmphibiansTriathlon through their 90min skills and pace session this evening. I was simply struck by how peaceful night riding can be and how your perception of speed changes. With little or no cars around you can rule the road and use the whole road to your advantage and have a lot of fun taking bends through the racing line and weaving in and out of flys n moths that are fixated on your beam! So roll on next week… Off road MTB in the dark! Yikes, the bridleways round here are a little bumpy to say the least!

As I have a 4 man team 24hr mountain bike race at the end of July it is imperative that I get used to riding in the dark on and off road. It is a different skill and many struggle to come to terms with the difference in light conditions and the ‘eeriness’ of the dark. The screeches of the foxes, the owls and bats flying overhead (yes had both last night), in fact one little bat decided to follow me 5feet above my head for about 100m and then swoops into my bright beam of light to eat the insects trapped in it’s 700 lumins tractor beam! Thanks USE for such amazing lights!

So go on, get out in the dark nights and experience a new take on riding! You won’t regret it!

Welcome World from COACH4tri!

8 years running a professional online triathlon and cycling coaching and fitness testing company COACH4tri, top age group / elite triathlete in the sport since since 1991, having tested over 600 athlete’s and coached over 200 athlete’s and only just starting a blog!… (yes I am a ‘noob’ when it comes to internet marketing, online social media and generally anything IT related!). Years ago I couldn’t see the point, thought it was for those geeky techy nerds that I never knew, as I was surrounded by hardcore macho triathlete types eager to lay the smack down on any training session and generally show how fast and strong they were on any given training swim, bike or run session.

Nick Finch, Cape Epic MTB race, 2011

Fast forward to 2011 and I now see what all the hoopla is about having my best bud and training partner Nick run his own IT business and show me how important it really is to get your business running at the top of it’s game and at the forefront to who you are trying to market too. But wait… where do I start… there’s Facebook, twitter, youtube, linkden, blogging, email newsletters, video blogs… the list goes on AGGGHHHH, where to start! And even when you have all the applications what next!? What do you go with first and publish… how do you target to the right individuals… how the hell do you get ‘to’ any individuals… then there’s making sure you don’t spam any inboxes so you don’t infuriate those that may not like your product (god knows I have been there with so much crap and spam in my email that when you get back from a weeks holiday you have 300+ emails to sift through… what’s that all about!)… yes that is exactly what I was faced with only a few weeks ago when coming back from a busman’s holiday to the French Alps and Miami (‘ooooohhh get him, jet-set lifestyle’ I hear you say).

So hear I am… sitting in my office (well my kitchen / dining room) tapping away on my computer looking at the cyclist’s going by (we live deep in the West Sussex countryside and see cyclist’s go past our door regularly as it’s so quiet and countryside picture postcard pretty) thinking I really need to get outside and train… but this has to be done. I have been putting this blog off for years, so I have to put finger to computer (I would have said pen to paper but who uses those nowadays… it’s a lost art for sure but don’t get me started on that already this is supposed to be a nice friendly introduction!).

Over the coming weeks, months (and possibly years!), I hope to write my musings about the triathlon, cycling, endurance sports, sports science, fitness testing, coaching athlete’s and anything else that may be relevant without boring the pants of those that follow me! I hope to offer the latest in research (with the help of other masters in their field) and link people to relevant sites, blogs and pages that help everyone be the absolute best they can be and help realise their goals and dreams (‘dreams’ I hear you say, dreams! what namby pamby type of guy is this!). Bare with me here, as so many people have dreams and aspirations to make race faster, improve their quality of life, , quit their job and do something they really want to do, move out of the City… well let me tell you there are doer’s and those that do not! The ones that are prepared to get up off their proverbial backside and make that first bold step towards something that they truly want in life are the ones that make big things happen in life! Remember every journey starts with that first step. I say all this because it is exactly what we (me / Mark and Michelle) did 8 years ago!

I dare you… no… I double dare YOU to list what you truly want in life then make that first step. Your journey may tale a few steps to reach where you want to be or it may take a lifetime of steps. But remember this…

‘It is better to attempt something great and fail… than achieve nothing and succeed’.

Now get up off your behinds… go and do something you ‘want to do’ not something you ‘need’ to do! And until next time, keep smiling, keep training fun, and never stop learning!

Right… the front door beckons, the thunder and lightning and rain has stopped, and it looks bright… time for my first run in 3 weeks (don’t ask why, but I am taking a sabbatical from tri training and going Tour de France crazy and becoming a full on cyclist for 2011… but that’s for another blog post!)… MarkT

Update: Completed said run and was the first in 5 weeks since being in the French Alps at the end of May! Just a nice easy jog, heart rate low, pace nice and easy and beautiful run along our nice peaceful country lane… this is the life!

Wed: 3hr MTB to coach 90min at Horsham Amphibians Triathlon then a short 1hr MTB home. Big race pace endurance set for them tonight!