kaburns1214 Mentor Group 2013 (Year 3!) - CLOSED (Page 33)

Ok, pictures.  Here's one with a cycling buddy on a trip a couple years ago.  I'm in the blue sweater...

And here's the action photo...

Yeah you could tell the difference.  I like fist drills FWIW.  The paddles are 10x worse.

What are fist drills?

Basically swimming with your hand in a fist.  It takes your hand out of the equation and forces you to focus on an early vertical forearm and "catching" the water with your forearm.

I love lacrosse. I didn't play until my late 20's when and friend and I joined an indoor league having never played. We told the guy running it we had never played and to just yell at us when we were out of position. We sucked so bad on offense that first year but his soccer experience and my football and hockey let us understand the dynamics and we were good defenders nearly from the start. One night a team playing after us was short on players and we got asked to stay and play. There were only 6 of us not including the goalie so one sub. You would hit the bench and get a ten second blow and somebody else would be opting out. That hour I came closer to puking then any other time including wind sprints in football.

I hate fist drills so the paddles must be brutal. I love swimming with the regular paddles because I can fly.

Were you riding up Alpe d'Huez?  How was it?

luv2bhealthy - 2013-01-09 2:31 PM Lots of rain yesterday and today.  Need to get back into the pool.  Perhaps Friday would be a good day!  Haven't swam since my last tri in September. 

Swimming is an interesting animal.  Once you are comfrtable with the distance it can be low ROI w/r/t getting faster BUT its a great recovery activity and you can work on anaerobic and the ATP/CP system in the pool without running the same rsik of injury. 

How relevant the conversation ...  I have 1600 tonight, with 800 being fist drills .... argh.  Thankfully the ipod is charged up!!!

The only day that its important to be fast is race day.  Everything else is just information to adjust training. 

Nice shot....was the beer drinking before the ride? Perhaps that is why you were smiling on that climb?

I am a masher as well and a normal cadence for me is around 80-85.  Is it possible to successfully develop a higher cadence?  What are you doing to address this?  

You can find workouts out there.  Stuff like progressive spin ups.  Since Kelly has a power meter you start out at something like 75 rpm and after 5 mins have your power at a set number say 150.  After 2 mins pull back a gear, up your cadence say 5 rpm but try to keep the power the same.  Repeat after 2 mins.  You could probably do the same thing with HR and trying to keep your HR in Z1 while you pull back gears

Don't disagree with anything you have both said, and it doesn't matter if you call it a test or not.  If you say in my workout log to do the workouts at the fastest sustainable speeds ... you know it is going to hurt!  That's all. Some of us just get more anxious than others when we see these in our workout logs

As an aside, as much as I didn't really like doing all the fist drills last night, they did exactly what they were supposed to. About half way thru the workout, there was a noticeable difference in feeling like my hands and forearms were like 1 big paddle.  Signifcant difference in the pull I was getting thru the water!!!

I think I'm odd because the workouts that hurt are my favorite.  LOL.

Yay on the fist drills.

I got faster vs my competition this morning without even working out..........by moving into the 45-49 age group, LOL.

I had a really good workout to celebrate which considering how bad I felt last night I'm was pleasantly surprised. 1:10 on the bike with 30 minute Z1 warm-up followed by 40 minutes of intervals and then a 5 mile run.

I pumped myself full of Airborne and Oscillococcinum (homeopathic remedy) last night and my wife said I slept 3 times as loud as I normally do. Hopefully I don't have the afternoon crash and feel bad again which is apt to happen.

This sounds pretty similar to what has worked for me, though I've only used HR.  I have just done some rides where I let cadence be the primary goal.  That is, keep the cadence at 90 or 95 or whatever your goal is, and use the biggest gear you can that allows you to keep that cadence and a Z2 heart rate.  The first few rides you do this, that turns out to be a pretty small gear, and you don't move very fast (at least I didn't).  As your legs get more efficient at spinning faster, though, you get more "oomph" for the same cadence/heart rate, and you do go faster.