Bad Run Plan -- What Not to Do

Don't ever try this...

I had a long-ish run planned for this past Tuesday. So I decided to run the 4.5 miles to my son's high school and watch him play in a 7-on-7 football passing league game. I was running a little late, so I picked up the tempo a bit for the last two miles. Sat and watched the game for an hour, and then ran home.

The run home was painful and awful, every single step. Never found a rhythm. Felt sore and worn out all evening.

Bad idea to sit for an hour in the middle of a run.

The Long(er) Ride

I finally made the time and mental commitment to do a proper long ride. I've done lots of 1, 2  and even a 3-hour ride. But 4+ is where the fatigue can really set in, and you separate the man in you from the...not man.

4:10 last Saturday, including an ascent of Mt. Diablo here in the SF East Bay. The plan was to sit just under goal half IM bike power for most of it, and push +10% or so on the climbs. Try to bring the whole ride in around 155 watts or so.

But I got a little carried away; just couldn't help it. At 2:15 I was most of the way up the mountain, sitting at 168 watts (NP average). And then power just started dropping. By the summit, I was at 165. After the descent, at 160. During the last hour home on mostly flats, I drifted all the way back to 152 average for the ride.

So, lessons learned.

Lessons:

• Remember to eat. I need calories on these longer rides.

• Stop to refill water. I was impatient and skipped a water stop on the way up. Was mildly dehydrated the rest of the day.

• Pace more carefully. Have a plan; stick to the plan. It would have been a better workout if I had kept the first half under 160w, then picked it up for the last hour going home.

• Finally...I do not yet possess the long-ride stamina for the event. My 60min power is on track -- I think I'm at about 210w, and my goal was to get to 200w. Based on that, my plan is to race at 160w. But I have to still do the longer rides to build stamina to hold that power and still run.

But, it's all going in the right direction.

Benchmark Ride

I set out Sunday to do a 3-hour ride, with a target IF of .80, or a TSS of at least 190. The half IM ride will require a similar TSS load, so I need to execute many of these rides in training. I can't just "finish" them...they have to be comfortable and repeatable.

I got it done. I'm estimating my 60min Power at 190w right now. My ride of 158w (NP) for 3:05 brought the TSS in at 214, the highest TSS I've gotten done in over 5 years. The ride was tiring...too tiring to go out an run a sub-2 hour half marathon. But...it's only the first one. I'll hit these at least once a week going forward.

Didn't get a long run in this weekend. I'll have time to do that mid-week early in the morning one day.

I gotta get my lazy ass to master's swim...

Trouble with the Calendar

Just checking in here to confess to a lack of structure in my training. Running is going good -- really good. I feel great and the miles just float by. Speed is coming around, and I think running 2 hours is going to be within reach by September 21.

I have done four rides in 3 weeks. Not good; not at all. That's barely enough to maintain a steady low level of fitness; I'm certainly not going to get better. Going to redouble my commitment to riding starting this weekend with a long ride on Sunday. Goal is to hold an appropriate steady effort and see how the power numbers come out. I'm really hoping to end up around 150w without pushing too hard. Race goal is 160w, again without pushing too hard.

I've been getting in the pool once a week for an easy 1k yards. Still a little intimidated to show up at masters. Going to have to get over that and just get it done.

All in all, I feel good and I know I could improve quickly. But life conspires to interfere with my plans and I'm just not getting the work done.

Weight is good -- I started this escapade weighing about 184. I'm down to 174 and I think 165-168 is definitely reachable without any overt calorie restriction. Just stick to fruits, veggies and quality proteins+fats and I'll be fine.

One good bit of news -- I pulled down a stack of pants hidden away on the top shelf of my closet. You know the deal -- pants you bought in a bout of optimism that never really fit?

They all fit now! :-)

Turning a Corner...?

I hear a lot that it takes six weeks of training after a long time off to even begin to feel like an athlete again. Well, once again, I have learned that bit of wisdom is spot-on.

My long run on Sunday finally felt normal. While I'd been doing them, it was more through grit and stubbornness that through actual athletic grace. Pound it out; keep saying, "I need to finish this."

But this Sunday, I went 2 hours and it felt like...just running. No drama. Outbound leg at a smooth 10:30 pace, with HR a full 20bpm below where I would normally expect to do a half IM run. Return leg at a picked-up 9:35, still below target half IM heart rate. Really smooth...great feeling.

And so it goes...onward and upward. This old body ain't done yet.

Riding Strategy

Among the most asked (and argued) questions on tri forums (ie, Slowtwitch) regards the best strategy for riding a hilly triathlon course. Most answers are of the sort where people just post their own anecdotal experience, and then they finish with stating how great their approach has worked. Guys with lots of road racing experience will usually advise hammering up the hills, and then tucking and coast down. Others will advise a steady effort.

None of this is meaningful without a methodical approach that takes the right issues into account. We start with a few basic premises:

First: We are to adopt here (as I've made clear throughout this blog) the notion that increasing physical effort (power output) has an even more-rapidly increasing effect on physical stress. It has been shown that, as power output increases, various markers of metabolic stress increase to the fourth power of increases in power output. In other words, 5% more power -- or 1.05 times what you were doing before -- increases your metabolic stress by 22%, which is (1.05^4) - 1.

This relationship is at the core of the "normalized power" construct that has proved to be enormously useful and reliable for planning racing and training. By "normalizing" we mean that, rather than use the simple average power output for a given ride, we weight the averaging by this fourth power calculation. In a simple average, 100w for 10 minutes, then 200w for 10 minutes produces an average of 150w for 20 minutes.

When normalizing the power output for the exponentially higher physical cost of the higher effort, the average NP = 171w. This is higher than the 150w simple average, and reflects the much higher cost of the harder second half of the ride. The stress of the ride was *as if* we had ridden the whole thing at 171w.

When we ride a triathlon bike course, we need to decide ahead of time what power output we could hold *if* the course was flat and we could ride at a dead-steady effort. Let's say I decide to ride a course at a goal of 175w. *If* the course was flat, I would just sit on that power output the whole way. But, my course is hilly and I need to know if I should ride harder uphill, and by how much.

I set up a program to ask this question. It's a straightforward objective/constraint analysis, with fixed inputs.

Objective: Ride the course segment in the minimum amount of time.
Constraint: Do not exceed 175w, normalized average.
Fixed inputs: Rider+bike weight; CdA; tire Crr; gravity.
(CdA = Coefficient of drag x Frontal Area; Crr = rolling resistance of tires).

To look at the question, we can ignore the flat parts of the ride (simple answer: sit on 175w), and analyze just a few stylized hill sections. We'll look at three: Steep, short up and longer shallow down. Long shallow up and shorter steeper down. Equal going up and down.

Results...
4% up; 2% down twice as far.
Ride up at 196w and down at 130 watts.
This means it's OK to lift power by 12% going up, and soft-pedal coming down.

2% up; 4% down half as far
183w going up; 109w coming down.
The longer ride up requires keeping the power bump lower (just +5%!); the steeper descent means soft pedal even less.

3% up; 3% down
188w up; 117w down.

Note that the actual distance doesn't matter. Results are the same for any actual distance; it's the relative distances that matter.

The gist of all this is that there is no single best strategy. But, some rules of thumb are apparent:

In all cases, do not spike your power much more than about 10%, and that's only if it's a short climb relative to the descent. It's not worth the little extra speed -- you'll just tire out faster, ride slower and, of course, run slower.

The longer the hill, the more you need to back off the temptation to ride harder.

I won't go into the details for a strategy with wind. Suffice to say...the optimal strategy for dealing with headwinds and tailwinds is very close to just riding steady and ignoring the wind. So close in fact that you should just ignore wind and ride at your target power as if there was no wind.

Raising the Roof

As I get deeper into my "comeback" I can't help but benchmark to prior levels of fitness and performance. As I've said repeatedly, I am painfully slow. But, it's only been a month and I haven't really had a chance to adapt to the main training load.

Nonetheless, a particular thing struck me the past two weeks as I added some harder segments within rides and runs. My heart rate just doesn't go very high.

In the past, my HR sat around 160-165 for an entire half IM. A 40k time trial I did in spring 2006 saw a sustained HR of around 170. I could easily hit 175-180 if doing intervals or charging up a hill to stay with a riding group. My all-day steady ride/run HR was 148-152. This is higher than the average person, but that's why there are bell curves.

This past Saturday, I pushed a 2:15 ride pretty hard...harder than I would ride a half IM. And my HR never got over 155. I had trouble keeping it at 150.

Doing some T pace mile repeats running, HR peaked out at 156. Those should have been above 165.

What this tells me is that I am sitting significantly below my VO2max potential. In long-course racing, there is little need for an AG athlete like me to attempt to fully maximize my genetic limit of VO2max. But...as Phil Skiba terms it..."raising the roof" a little can't hurt. I decided to do one VO2max working on the run this week; will do one on the bike next week. Then back to normal training for a month and re-evaluate.

My favorite running workout for lifting VO2max is a set of 30/30's. Warm up with easy running for 10-15 minutes, then run 30 seconds at about the pace you could hold for 3 laps (if you're slow) or 4 laps (if you're fast) of a track. Again...you're running just 30 seconds at a pace you could hold for 4-6 minutes. Take it easy...it's tempting to go too hard.

After 30 seconds of that, run at easy/jogging pace for 30 seconds, then go back to the fast pace for 30 seconds. Repeat. I did a set of 12 of these, with a brief walking break halfway through. Done once a month, you might do as many as 20. 12 was plenty for now.

The idea here is to get the metabolic stress (stimulus) of the fast effort, while minimizing the physical/mechanical stress of doing longer intervals.

Next week, I'll hit a local hill on the bike that takes about 3.5 minutes to climb at a hard effort. I'll do 4 repeats of that at VO2max effort.

In a week or two, I should see a modest improvement in my ability to get my HR higher on tempo efforts. Higher HR (all else equal) can mean more oxygen to the muscles, which is where the action takes place.