Journey to Ironman MD: Week 8

This week: Not getting any younger, reminder edition

It had been a pretty good week, all things considered – I had done some core workouts, I had been on the bike, and if I missed the swim on Monday, well, it was going to be icy/messy, and why take chances? Then, on Wednesday morning, going out for my run, I made a little jump down some steps – maybe three feet vertical, four feet horizontal, nothing major – but I failed to stick the landing, and my left knee hyperextended. At first I was hopeful that it was just a tweak, and I could walk it off, but no. Two full days of rest later, I am hopeful I can get back on the bike/in the pool without pain. But stairs, as my son likes to say, remain my greatest weakness.

I was due for a rest week, in any case, and hadn't planned on doing too much this week. Saturday and Sunday saw my long bike ride/ long run go off without a hitch. February 14^th/15^th is the weekend when I will be in Austin, Texas, for Cupid's Undie Run and the Austin half-marathon. The undie run is an awesome fundraiser for the Children's' Tumor Foundation, which does research towards a cure for Neuro Fibromatosis. The run was started by a friend of a friend – if you want to support me running in my undies for a good cause, you can go to http://my.cupids.org/ChrisMartin.

The half-marathon was planned as a full marathon, back in November, when I had just done a half-marathon. But, the winter training didn't go off as planned, so I'll only be doing 13.1. Goal is to finish strong, running sub-9 minute miles. Basically a training day with support and the opportunity to see some friends.

I'll be doing the CORE Bootcamp on Saturday (knee health permitting) + Long ride, Long run on Sunday (again, knee permitting), and then back into the swing of it for February. I'll discuss goals and evaluate January overall next week.

Journey to Ironman MD: Weeks 6 & 7

Sorry for the delay in posting – last week was a travel week, and then this week was spent recovering from the travel. Knowing that travel is going to get in the way of your training is important – don't imagine you are going to manage to fit in that 10 mile run on the same day you are flying across the country with your family.

That aside, the training has been good-not-great – I've not been back in the pool for two weeks, but I've managed to not miss two full days in a row without some sort of workout. Mostly, in my attic on my bike (I've finished Band of Brothers; suggestions for another series that runs about an hour?) but also out on the run. I've got the Austin ½ marathon coming up in three weeks, and I'm going to try to go a bit faster there than I did in Richmond in November.

The core work remains a challenge. I've put it on the schedule, and managed to do a couple of sessions (which is certainly an improvement), but it is still the first thing that slips off the calendar. I also missed two weeks of Boot Camp, which is killing me!

One thing that has been driving me to the bike instead of the pool is that I am on the Washington DC Tri Club (DCTC)'s winter team, and January is Bike Month – we are participating in the USAT's National Club Championship, currently in 2^nd place vs. San Diego. Go figure, San Diego has an easier time getting the bike miles in than we do in DC. J February is Run month, so I'll be probably focusing a bit more on that. Still, getting to the pool at least 2x a week is really important if I want to do well in the water in October. It seems like a long ways away, but swimming is all about technique, and that means a lot of focused repetition. If this blizzard doesn't sock us in, I'll definitely be at the pool for Masters this week!

Journey to Ironman MD: Week 5

Happy New Year! This is the first week I've taken the bike out of the garage and set it up on the trainer so I can ride indoors. I have it set up so I can watch videos on my computer, and as I've never seen Band of Brothers all the way through, that's my current project. 5 episodes down so far!

A real challenge I am having is fitting in my core workouts, and I know I have to do something about this. For some reason, I have an easier time with the "big three," run/bike/swim – I put them on the schedule, and I get about 90% of them I think that's the problem right there – I am not committing to a regular schedule of core workouts, and so they are slipping. No more! I'll get together with the folks at CORE this weekend and discuss a better strategy – maybe I don't have to do a full 30 minutes to get the benefit? I can absolutely work in 15 minutes a day for core work.

Last week, I discussed my plan for getting back on the bike – I was going to ease back into it. But that's not what happened! My bike workouts have gone 45 – 75 minutes each! I guess I expected to need more time to get back to that level of riding. So, that's a good thing. I haven't run every day like I planned, and that's not a good thing. One thing my coach always did for me was send me a "workout template" for the week, which was exactly what it sounded like – which workouts to do on which days. It made training super easy. As I am trying to do that for myself, I begin to see the value that people are getting from buying a coached program – it sure saves on thinking things through!

Here is my workout log for the week, to give you a sense of where I am, workout wise.

	Saturday, Jan 3	Sunday Jan 4	Monday, Jan 5	Tuesday, Jan 6	Wednesday, Jan 7	Thursday, Jan 8	Friday, Jan 9
RUN			35 minutes		15 minutes		40 minutes
BIKE	45 minutes	60 minutes		60 minutes	45 minutes	75 minutes
SWIM			50 minutes		45 minutes		50 minutes
CORE

 

What is missing, to me, is a long run on Sunday the 4^th. If I had managed to get in a 90 minute run on that day (or really, any other day), I'd call it a pretty darn good week of training. As it is, a solid "B." Next week, I'll add in the scheduled core work, and I'll get a long run in on the weekend – I love running in the cold, so this is a great time of year for me, for that. I've started tracking calories as well, with a goal of getting down to 165 pounds in the next 10 weeks, about ~1.5 / week. Next week, I'll talk a little about how I manage nutrition (spoiler: Badly), and some about how to train through vacations.

 

Journey to Ironman MD, Week 4

Planning for a major endeavor is, for some people, something to be dreaded. Something terrifying and unpleasant, a chore. Others relish it, diving into the minutiae and the organizational frenzy with a gusto. I fall somewhere in the middle. Planning is a lot of work. Plans never work out the way you envision them. But I believe that having any kind of plan is better than not planning at all. This week I want to talk about my strategies for planning an Ironman schedule, how I go about it, and how I came to this particular method.

When I did my first Ironman, I didn't really know anything about how to train. I'd been a dancer for a long time, and I understood the need for a disciplined approach to training. What I did not appreciate was the fundamental similarities between rehearsing for a performance and training for an endurance race. The foundational training for triathlon - swim, bike, run - is much like the regular studio work that any dancer has as the foundation of their technique. You have class every day, or near enough, and you probably have several different kinds of classes, depending on what your personal passions are. In those classes, you work hard, but you don't push yourself to exhaustion. You focus on technique, you try to drive an kind of memory of sequence and musicality into your fascia, so that when the time comes for you to perform, you can engage skill at a subconscious level . Great performances look easy, no matter how much hard work is going on. In rehearsing for a particular event, however, you have to push harder to get things done in a limited time frame. The choreographer might be pushing the limits of your skill, and you have to focus intensely on getting things exactly right as soon as possible. The goal, in a lot of ways, is to get ready for performance before you step on stage, or go into the audition, or enter the competition. Your intensity is very sharp in the four-to-eight weeks before the event.

When I started, I was lucky - I had a good friend who coached me personally, and he has been doing triathlons since he was in high school. If you want to take up endurance sports, there are a lot of good resources out there, and the internet makes it very easy to find them. Joe Friel's blog is a great place to start - http://joefriel.typepad.com- he is a venerated source of wisdom in the triathlon community. There are links there for a bunch of other coaches and tons of useful information. You could do a lot worse than to pay for a pre-fabricated training plan to get you to your first race. For me, I know enough to work backwards, and get a sense of what I need to be doing. I'll still consult with my coach, and get feedback, but here is a short overview of HOW I build a plan.

October 3, 2015 - Race Day! On this day, I need to be able to race 140.6 miles – swim 2.4, bike 112, and Run 26.2 miles. Everything builds to this!

September: Last big workouts and "Taper"

Running: Long Run, 20 miles, easy; 3x Run, total 30 miles

Biking: Long Ride, 100 miles, easy; 2x Bike, total 150 miles

Swimming: Long Swim, 4500 meters, easy; 3x Swim, total 10,000 meters

The month before the race: Four weeks out I'll do a 20 mile run. On another day, a 100 mile bike ride. On yet another day, I'll do a long swim of 4500 meters. As well as all of that, I have 8 other workouts to get in during the week, with the total mileage you see. That's a rough plan, and it reflects the first part of the "Taper." Tapering is the process by which you let your body heal, a little, before the race.

Each month building up to September has a purpose, to get me to those workouts. I'll develop my "Run" fitness early, by doing a spring marathon – that will provide a foundation both for getting faster, and for the bike training. Through the entire year, I will swim, trying for 4x per week. Lots and lots of time in the water! And of course, the entire time I will be working on strengthening my core, with the workouts that CORE fitness has developed for me. Next week, I'll talk about the plan for January!

Any questions or thoughts about this plan? I don't think its entirely half-baked, but hey, I'm open to the possibility that I could improve it! Please comment below!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Journey to Ironman MD Week 3

Journey to Ironman MD Week 3

 

Subtitle: "What do you do when things go wrong?"

This week, I want to talk about the bad "X" – the bad workout, the bad meal, the bad day, the bad week. In any endeavor that spans significant time, things are going to go wrong. You need to have a plan!

For me, my third week was BAD. I missed my long run Sunday, then didn't make it to the pool at all – not once. Work issues, family issues, holiday issues. Lots of issues – I should get a subscription! – and only I managed two good things: a 6 mile run on Friday, and the CORE Bootcamp on Saturday. I missed two swim workouts, and three running workouts. Basically, I lost a week of training. That can be VERY depressing! The temptation is to allow that frustration, that sense of failure, to infuse everything else in the week – to stop eating healthily, to slip off the sleeping schedule, to get grumpy and basically unpleasant. In the past I have done all of those things – and guess what? It doesn't make it any better. In the moment, you KNOW that it doesn't make it any better, but that doesn't make it easy to resist that third second slice of pizza.

This is why it is so important to have a plan. There is a great saying – "failing to plan is planning to fail." I'm still in the planning phase of my training – something else that was supposed to get done last week! – but because I have been down the road a few times, I have a sense of what I need to be doing. That has allowed me to muddle through the first couple of weeks of training. Step one, get back in the pool, step two, keep up the run mileage (step three: Profit!). Of course, having just a "sense" of what is needed is not good enough! To be successful, I believe you need to put your plan on paper. Or use a planning tool – there are so many good free ones online now! For me, if I haven't written it down, committed it to some form of documentation, then it is all too easy to let things slide. When you have a plan, you can see how your future plans are being affected by your current problems. No matter how bad the "X" is, having a plan allows you to DO something about the future, proactively.

What kind of things can you do? Well, when the X is small – a missed workout, a bad meal – it isn't hard to make it up. Getting an extra run in one day, or having salad for lunch and dinner instead of just for lunch. When X is bigger – a bad week, a bad injury – you have to make bigger adjustments. Maybe you aren't going to be able to go full out on your "B" race, or maybe you need to step the distance down on your planned long run, and re-calibrate your entire schedule, or adjust your expectations for performance on race day. The sooner you know about a problem, the sooner you acknowledge you have a problem, the sooner you can alter your plan to ensure that you maximize the possible future results. Very few things are worse, on race day – emotionally and physically – than having lied to yourself about your fitness. If you can go sub-11 hours, and you go 11h08, that's acceptable. If you believe you can go sub-11 hours, and you "crack" (break down physically or mentally) and go 14h30, that is no fun. But if you had known that you were only in shape to go 12h30, and raced accordingly, you can feel good about the 12h15 that you bring in. Look at it another way – in any race, it's the last ¼ that tells the tale. You can't slow down by a lot in the last 25m of a 100-meter dash. If you aren't in shape, by the time you get to mile 15 of the marathon, you are going to know! Lots of training manuals and anecdotes from professional triathletes say that the race doesn't even BEGIN until mile 15 of the marathon!

When you are going long – and I'll be going 140.6 miles! – you need to have the mental flexibility to deal with a bad stretch. Nine months from now, I will toe the line at IM Maryland, and when I do, my performance on that day is going to be dictated, in some small but significant way, by the choices I make today. I can choose not to swim, because getting up an extra 90 minutes early is going to wreck my day – and those 2500 meters are not going to make a huge difference. But if I make that decision EVERY day, for MONTHS, then I am no way no how going to swim 2.4 miles in 59 minutes (Goal – break 1 hour on the swim!). I have to be in the pool regularly, work with someone on improving my technique early in the season, and make the investment in time in order to get the payoff of 10 to 15 minutes. And I have to do that despite having a bad week! This is about damage control, and all about minimizing the loss caused by things beyond your ability to anticipate. There will be bad Xs – but a positive mental attitude, and a plan that has the flexibility to handle the occasional setback, will get you through to your best performance.

Next week, I want to talk about my plan, how I created it, and what kinds of considerations I will make along the way to ensure that the plan is working. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below!

 

Journey to Ironman MD, Week 2

There are three legs to any triathlon, no matter the distance: Swim – which always comes first, Bike – which always comes second, and Run (you guessed it, always third). The "kind" of triathlon is determined by the distances.

Sprint: ~200-750 meter swim, ~10 – 15 mile bike, ~3.1 mile run.

Olympic: 1500 meter swim, ~25 mile bike, 6.2 mile run.

Half-Iron: 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, 13.1 mile run.

Iron, or "Full": 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run.

I'm training for the longest one, but I'll do some of the others along the way. The races that lead up to your main event are usually called "B" or "C" races, meaning that you are really taking it a little easy, not trying to win so much as to gauge your fitness. That's the theory, anyway, I personally have a hard time not leaving it all out there on the course.

This week was my first week back in the pool in more than a year. I love the feeling of swimming – especially the first 25 meters or so, when you remember how awesome it is to feel the water streaming by your body, the rhythm of the breathing, the sharp way your arms cut into the water. Then, around the 26^th meter, you realize that you haven't been in the pool in FOREVER, your technique has fallen apart, and your body really, really, really, _really_ doesn't want to swim any further. That part is less fun.

No question, the swim is the part of the event that keeps most people – fit, athletic people – from trying a triathlon. I can't count the number of times I've been told that "it looks like fun, but man, I just don't know how to swim anymore!" I sympathize – I grew up spending every summer at a pool, I was a lifeguard when I was in college, but I didn't really swim. If you already kind of know how to swim, though, learning to swim better is easy and fun – you just have to join a group of other people doing the same thing. Like a swim team that a kid might be on, but for adults, and for the most part without swim meets – they call these groups "Masters Programs," and they are all over. If you do a quick internet search, and you live in a major metro area, I bet you can find one within 15 miles of your house.

Although the name suggests some sort of mastery, this is not really the case – sure, there are the people who were competitive swimmers in college, and yes, it can be a bit intimidating to walk into the pool in a swimsuit in front of strangers if you are just starting to come back into your "fighting trim," but these groups – all the ones I've ever been to, anyway – are welcoming. Workouts are set by ability, more or less, and you find yourself sharing a lane (like bowling lanes, or track lanes) with other people about your speed. There is usually a coach on deck, who will set the workout and give some feedback on your stroke, if you want it.

I am training with the Washington DC Tri Club's Masters' program – DCTC, as they are known, have been running, biking, and swimming in an organized fashion for more than a decade. My first workout was pretty brutal – we warmed up by swimming 600 meters easy, then did a 100 sprint to loosen up, and another 200 super easy to cool back down. That wasn't so bad. The 3x500 meters at "Best average pace" was rough. The idea is you swim 500 meters, no stopping, at a pace that you can hold as you do it 3 times. The idea was to get a "threshold" test on the first day back in the water, to see where everyone was endurance wise. I kind of surprised myself – I wouldn't have bet that I could swim 1500 meters on my first day back without my arms falling off! My splits were

1^st 500: 9m52s

2^nd 500: 10m20s

3^rd 500: 10m10s

Not fast – but I did manage to find some speed at the end of my last set. Considering that the race I'll be doing in October is 3860 meters, I have a lot of work to do if I want to swim my goal time of 60 minutes!

Journey to Ironman Maryland 2015

Hello

Hello to new readers! I'm Chris Martin, and I've been blogging here about my racing off-and-on (and off, for a long while!) since I started doing triathlons. If you want to poke through the archives, you will find a lot of stuff that might interest someone new to triathlon. In the meantime, a little about me:

Age: 45

Married, "M," 18 years. One son, 15, "J" Two cats. No dog, because we are apartment dwellers, and if we got a dog it would be too big for our space.

First triathlon: Lake Belows Tri, NJ, 2008

Currently I am an engineer working for Cisco, but this is a pretty big change for me – my first career was in the arts – I was a dancer and musical theatre performer in NYC for 15 years. I left to go into Academia, but that didn't work out as planned – I picked up an MA in American Dance History from FSU and a Ph.D. from UMD in Theatre and Performance Studies (dissertation on race relations and ballroom dancing in the USA between the Civil war and WWI available upon request) – but never landed anything more stable than a couple of adjuncting gigs. So I took a lateral career move, and ended up as a project manager for a small company, working on Federal contracts. That ended in February of this year, and since then, Cisco, which has been awesome.

I started triathlon as a way to keep in shape in grad school after decades of dancing 40 - 60 hours / week. Today, I do it because it is a lot of fun (and it does help keep the weight down)!

Odd numbered years are Ironman years for me, and 2015 is looking like IM Maryland!

http://www.ironman.com/triathlon/events/americas/ironman/maryland.aspx#axzz3KUSxjHQB

I've raced on this course two or three times at the ½ IM distance, it is flat and fast, and having the race in October will mitigate the biggest obstacle the race has held over the years – the heat. Eagleman (the ½ IM race on the same course) is run in June or July, and it can be blisteringly hot, with no shade, and brutal winds. At least October shouldn't be 103 degrees – the temperature on the day of my first (and only!) DNF.

This isn't my first Rodeo - I've done two iron-distance triathlons in the past, IM Wisconsin in 2009, and IM Coeur D'Alene in 2011. I was registered for IM Louisville in 2013, but went into the last month undertrained, and when I got a kidney stone two weeks before the race, I took it as a sign, and spent race day on the couch. For 2015, I have a plan to get my best time ever – a plan to race stronger, faster, and harder than I have in the past.

C.O.R.E. Fitness studio is the key to my plan. I'll be working with Ruth and the team to develop a personal training plan over the next few weeks, as well as regularly attending the Saturday Boot Camp classes. I'm getting back in the pool to train for the 2.4 mile swim starting December 1, and setting the bike up indoors to start training for the 112 mile ride January 1. I'm running in the Austin Marathon February 15^th, and I am planning on carrying that running fitness with me throughout the year. I'll do a few shorter races in the spring, and a ½ IM in late June or early July to assess the effectiveness of the training while there is still enough time to make adjustments – and then bang on through the summer and early fall to Cambridge, Maryland, and 140.6 miles of racing on October 3^rd!

I'll blog about the process on a weekly basis – look for updates on Fridays, for now – and I am happy to answer any questions about the process, or the sport, or anything else! I'm by no means an expert, but I have been racing for 6 years now, and learned a thing or two. And when I don't know something, I am pretty sure I know someone who does! My coach, Brian Shelden is a multiple has been doing triathlons a lot longer than me, is a regular qualifier for the World Championships in Kona, Hawai'i, and a great teacher.