brick94513-GoGoGo Mentor Group - Closed For Now! (Page 36)

Getting back into the pool in a big way after a day off. Legs are feeling much better than yesterday...can't imagine how they would feel after 24 hours of riding!

Tonight's swim:
500 warm up
6x50 drills
6x100 on 1:45
Ladder: 50-100-200-300-300-200-100-50
6x100 on 1:45
200 cool down

Tomorrow is a run day.

That is one hell of a swim workout. There's no way I would of made that second set of 100s on interval! You swimmers kill me!

I envy you swimmers!  Back to the pool for me tomorrow..*blub*blub*blub*

Hopefully gonna run afterwork today.  Rain & fog in the city right now.  Hopefully will be dry this afternoon. 

Hope everyone's postrace recovery is going well.   

sheeeeeeesh!! that's nice

I'm back in the pool tonight for about half of that. LOL

I did a light jog to help my wife train for her 5k. We walked to warm up and cool down and ran maybe 5mph on average. I made her do intervals up to 7mph for 30 seconds 3x during the run. We went 4 miles total walk/run. I'm pretty proud of her. Last year she trained for 2 weeks to do a 5k. Week one she couldn't make it 1.5 miles. 2 weeks later she ran the 5k in 30 minutes!!

Alright... took 2 rest days. I'm feeling more motivated to get back out there this morning. I'm probably going to get a short, light run in this morning, then head to the pool in the afternoon. I need to get a yoga schedule from the gym as I would like to get one session in before the weekend.

Thought this was appropriate after some recent discussions:

Overtraining Symptoms And How To Avoid The Negative Side Effects
Author : Robb Beams

As we get to the middle of race season, your performance program has become a combination of critical sport specific elements like aerobic, lactate tolerance and muscular strength workouts, flexibility and mental enhancement routines along with disciplined nutritional choices (pre/during/post workouts). With a matrix of all these elements becoming the foundation and infrastructure of your health, you have begun to settle into a level of speed and endurance that is representative of your consistency and discipline. You have also realized that you are literally only as strong as your weakest link which has forced you to self analyze what is working and what isn’t. Though this sounds like a simple evaluation with daily adjustments becoming routine, when your performance results begin to waiver, you quickly begin to lose your rational thinking and strive to offset poor results (from either racing or daily workouts) by pushing harder and/or longer to prove you are mentally tough and able to “push” to that next level of performance. However, after four to six weeks of lagging results you begin to become more and more frustrated which only makes your symptoms worse – WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF OVER TRAINING (OR AT LEAST CLOSE TO CROSSING THAT LINE)! In this article, we are going to help you identify if you are getting close to crossing that threshold of overtraining and if so, what you can do to reverse the negative side affects before they get worse and undermine your efforts to improve.

Step 1 – Identifying if you are experiencing any of these overtraining indicators:

While reading the overtraining indicators listed below, put a check mark beside each characteristic that is consistent with how you have been feeling over the last three months.

Overtaining Indicators

•Plateaus within your workouts and race results
•Inability to sleep even though you are physically and mentally fatigued
•Not able to wake up without the assistance of an alarm
•Feeling heavy and lethargic when you wake up
•Decreased desire to train (at any level of intensity)
•High resting heart rate in the morning – even after a day of low intensity workload(s)
•Inability to finish an easy workout without feeling like the effort was “hard”
•High heart rate while exercising at a low rate of speed
•Reduced appetite and other natural desires
•Increased cravings for simple sugar
•Lower body weight – more than 5 pounds within one week
•You get mad easy and over small issues
Evaluation: if you are experiencing more than three of these indicators on a regular basis, you are on your way to experiencing some long term effects of fatigue associated with overtraining. At this point in your program, you have two choices. One can ignore the indicators and wear yourself down further or two, you can evaluate where your program detoured and began to head the wrong direction. If you choose to evaluate your program, let’s take a look at what causes overtraining.

Step 2 – Identifying what causes overtraining

Though there are many schools of thought regarding what is the final activity that puts your body across the overtraining threshold, the bottom line is you may have brought this upon yourself by one or more of the following elements:

•Training above your intensive endurance level (usually around 83% - 85% of your heart rate reserve) too often
•Training duration is too long
•Not allowing for enough recovery in between high intensity intervals
•Increasing your volume and/or intensity too quickly
•Having your high intensity training volume greater than 25% of your total weekly volume
•Not providing your body with adequate amount of sleep for sufficient recovery
•Insufficient amount of quality calories (dense in micro and macro nutrients) consumed on a daily basis
Step 3 – Identify how this has happened to you?

Though you may be aware of the overtraining symptoms by definition, how does this level of fatigue catch up with you, the dedicated athlete? The answer is simply not observing the indicators that your body is sending you that it is tired, hungry and looking for a break. Look at the following list of variables relevant to rest, food and working out to see if you have experience any of them over the last three months:

Variables of Rest

•Awakening to an alarm – startled, tired and frustrated
•Going through each day rushed to get all of your tasks completed (i.e. too many irons in the fire!)
•Not getting 8 to 9 hours of quality sleep a night (five to six days a week)
Variables of Food

•Not sitting down to eat 5 to 7 small meals a day
•Not chewing your food a minimum of 10 times prior to swallowing
•Eating convenience foods that are high in simple sugars and low in nutritional value
•Not eating enough clean protein to provide the necessary micro nutrients to rebuild broken down muscle tissue (from training and racing)
•Not drinking 40-50 ounces of pure water on a daily basis
Variables of Working Out

•Working out too hard and too often in a week
•Not allowing enough rest in between intervals during your workouts
•Wanting to improve so badly that you ignore over training symptoms (see list of symptoms)
When one or more of these variables occur on a daily basis your body sends physiological messages to you in the forms of a high resting heart rate, suppressed appetite, dramatic drop in your morning body weight, etc. (should sound familiar if you take a look at the overtraining indicators listed above).

Step 4 – What you can do to avoid over training starting today!

The good news is there are four things that you can implement tomorrow that will reverse this trend of overtraining and will improve your performance to completely new levels:

•Create and follow a Periodization Program
•Maintain a detailed workout log
•Maintain a detailed food log
•Maintain the AEM Body Analysis Spreadsheet
Periodization Program

As discussed in a previous article, Championship Speed in 2009 through Periodization is the foundation to planning out your race season to ensure that you are identifying your key races, identifying your physical weaknesses, training these weaknesses and reevaluating field testing to confirm that you are moving your performance program forward on a consistent basis. The goal is to improve a little each week and ideally by the end of the year, you should be at a performance level you have never experienced before.

Detailed Workout Log

Also discussed in a previous article, Faster Lap Times & Increased Endurance by Understanding Energy Systems, understanding the various energy systems that you are training on a daily basis will ensure that you are not pushing too hard on your recovery days, and on the other side of the equation making sure that you hit the necessary intensity levels during your quality workouts. By maintaining a detailed workout log, you can keep track of important variables like intensity levels (as reported by your heart rate monitor), average pace, total distance covered, energy levels and your perception of the workout (productive, non-productive, hard or easy).


Though this seems like a mundane activity, you need to evaluate how you felt before, during and after each workout. When you do so, you will begin to see how the overtraining indicators are identified very quickly. Here is an example. If you are supposed to be completing an easy workout for 90 minutes and you are dragging to get up and out the door, you may want to stop and determine the cause of this fatigue: too much intensity or duration yesterday, not enough food consumed yesterday for recovery, not enough quality sleep? At this exact moment, you need to make a decision about the workout that you are getting ready to complete: should I even complete the workout, if so, should I cut the duration down, how low should I keep my heart rate during the workout to make sure that I create an environment for my body to actually recover and improve.

Detailed Food Log

By maintaining a detailed food log you can evaluate the quality of your workouts to the food you have consumed the day before and also during your workout. The key to this information is once you determine what food combinations are producing the best performance results for you, you have the tools to be the most prepared racer each and every race! Keep in mind that food because a functional component of everything you do in the performance world: build new muscle, repair damaged muscle, pre-hydrate the body from the inside out, top off glycogen storages within the liver and the muscles for intensity workloads and much more at the micro nutrient level (i.e. facilitate the absorption of other vitamins and minerals).

Thoughts? Questions?

Tim..............Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I read Joe Friel's book over the winter. I remember reading that in the first few years of training a person is going to most likely see improvement no matter how they train. I'm about 3 years in now. I'm going to guess that 90% of my run's and bike's avg above 80% of my max hr. So, yeah....I've got waaaaaaaaay too much intensity in my workouts. It's time to slow down and be more scientific about making progress.

thanks again!

Ha, I had all of these symptoms when I was a couch potato...  yikes, I was overtrained before I started training!   just kidding of course, now that I'm actually training, I don't really feel any of these things anymore, just funny to me how overtrained apparently feels quite similar to doing nothing.  The happy medium is somewhere inbetween.

I thought two rest days would be enough, but after I got moving on my run this morning, I started to have doubts. I wanted to do a easy, very slow run just to get my legs moving again. But, wow, my legs were heavy and my HR was definately elevated for the pace.

Back to stretching and more foam rolling right now!

what about a light swim?

I was planning on that for the afternoon. But we'll see. Trying to get some stuff done around the house today.

I'm off to go running, then swim.  Monday's swim felt horrible, I really hope today is better. 

Read your body, Luke...feel the force (Caaaaa...Caaaaa)  ( My 7 year old son has me watching way too much Star Wars!!!)

Seriously, for a type A Tri'er...that is hard to admit.  You exerted yourself for a long time.  Actually a f&*king looong time.  You deserve a few days break, otherwise you know hat will happen!!

If that was a marathon, you would not run for at least a week, yet you want to get back in the saddle.  

Just sayin'



Edited by GoGoGo 2010-05-05 3:00 PM

Good article Tim.  You'll feel better after a few more days of chilling, streatching & Rolling.   OH and I suggest a few Good Beers :-).   Sounds like that race overtrained you...

I know, I know.... its just hard for me to do nothing. I knew this was going to be a hard week with two big races so close together. I was hoping after two days my body would welcome a little low volume, low intensity work.

I'm always better at giving advice than following it.

Yep, so taking my own advice, I decided to go for a little swim.

Swim felt really good. Usually after not swimming for awhile I feel awkward in the water. But today, I felt like I had a really good feel for the water. I was intentionally trying to slow things down and work out a couple of form issues. The workout was short, but productive.

We haven't had a QOTD for a while! Let's take something from the article:

QOTD: Who here keeps track of there resting heart rate (RHR) or their differential heart rate (DHR) over time?

I'll track both of these measurements sporadically. But both, in my novice opinion, have inherent problems.

I find it is hard to get a consistent recording of the RHR. It requires routine and I'm not allowed that luxury with three kids who inevitably make into my bed in the morning. Also, by the time I move around and put my HR monitor on and try to lay back down for a few minutes, the measurement has already been altered. I have had my RHR fluctuate from 42 to 54. Validity is compromised.

The DHR is the difference between your HR at the end of your workout and your HR at one minute post exercise. The greater the difference means greater recovery translating to greater degree of fitness. While I like this measurement, it has its flaws too. Mainly the number can be influenced by the intensity of the workout. For example, my DHR will be greater after a tempo run versus long run. So, when using DHR, I try to compare apples to apples.

I rarely do this.  Some of my training is "scientific" & much is by "feel"

 

I'll check my RHR in the mornings on occasion when I feel like I might be pushin it too hard.  Never much cared to check post w/o HR after the cooldown.

BTW, thanks Tim for the compilation training plan idea you posted recently, I am combining a few different ones to make my own plan as well.

Mark, I'm runnin Encinitas solo next week now, the wife and offspring are skippin town.  I've got the key to my SILs pad in La Jolla and absolutely nothing to do except get my bike tuned up Friday.  What's our plans?

Wow... nice jon on the run. Also, way to be proactive with the ice bath and stick.

^^ cool, I'll PM you my #, give me a ring if you wanna hit up the expo/course.  I'd love to get a warm n' fuzzy prior to the race and I'm definitely most concerned about the surf more than anything else so a swim sounds good too.  Yeah, I hear ya on the swim transition entry.  I was checkin times and the maps last week and didnt understand why T1 was 4-5 mins for a lot of folks until I checked the bike map and saw the path and how far away it looked. 

Edited by shmeeg 2010-05-05 10:03 PM