stevebradley's Mentor Group FULL (Page 6)

nope, i just checked from my husbands account (he is not a paying member) and it still works.

i did edit my original post, though.
control panel
then "edit training settings"...or something like that
then friends

I've started my training log and added the group as friends.  Is there any way to go back and edit prior days? (Never mind - I figured it out.)

As far as not hearing from everyone on a daily basis, I think that just means some of us have more balance in our lives and don't spend 24/7 on computers! (Obviously not me...)  Of course we all know Neil is out riding his cool new bike!

Edited by mindymcc 2009-01-27 1:11 PM

Steve or anyone who has done a triathlon, can you weigh in on nutrition requirements during the race?  My hubby thinks none is required as long as your exercise time is under 2 hours.  Another friend says anything over 1 hour and you need to re-fuel.  I haven't gone over the 1 hour mark yet but I am close.  Just wondering what the different opinions are.  Thanks.

this girls thoughts:
nutrition is a very personal thing. It probably isn't necessary for a sprint tri, but it wouldn't hurt you to eat a gel or whatever sports nutrition you choose. I prefer Gu sports gels, but alot of people hate Gu and pick something different. The package of Gu says to take every 45 minutes. If you think you will be able to open the package and eat it on the bike, you can eat one 45 min from when you start the swim. When I race, I wear a tri top that has pockets in the back. that is where I keep my gel for easy access. I have also seen people duct tape them to their bikes (in a way you will be able to get it off while riding of course). if you don't think you can manage the coordination while biking, then put a gel in the transition area where you won't forget it when you get off the bike. I wear cycling shoes and than switch to running shoes so i put my gels on top of my shoes so i don't forget them. if you are wearing the same shoes for cycling and running, just put it somewhere else you won't forget it.

For an olympic distance race I DEFINITELY gel every 45 minutes.

a few things:
DO NOT EAT ANYTHING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A RACE. gel and other sports foods impact different people in different ways. you do not want to learn during a race that gels upset your stomach
experiment and find what works for you during training. you may find, like your husband, that you don't need anything for a sprint. that is fine, just know ahead of time.
there is an interesting thread on tri talk now called "negative thoughts while running". basically alot of people posted that they get defeatest thoughts ("i can't do this", "why am i doing this to my body", etc) when they are not properly fueled. i thought it was interesting. if you can't find it, I will send the link.

Edited by hooslisa 2009-01-27 3:11 PM

here's the link i mentioned..
http://www.beginnertriathlete.com/discussion/forums/thread-view.asp...

Great thread, thanks.  I find that I am constantly arguing with myself whenever I run and have to mentally break it into smaller pieces (quarters, thirds, half, etc) to get through it.  I also count down songs as I know about how many songs to a mile.  I am a little worried about race day and not being able to bike/run with my music!

there will be so much to look at and think about that you won't miss your music one bit!

BECKY -

NoNoNO! I wasn't calling you out on using ya'll, at all. I lived in Texas from '85-'87, and picked up the habit there. I slip into it very readily --- and I'm not even trying to be a southern poser!

The school I taught at for so long was all-Native, 99% Mohawk kids. It never ceased to amuse them when I used it. To them, it sounded like something from a galaxy far removed from their own. (And as a born and bred northerner, from Massachusetts, I'm going to bite my tongue and resist any further comments.......)

I saw that as well and just posted on your log..... we did the exact same thing right down to running with the dog..... Eli is your dog, right? It was too fun to resist running in OUR FIRST SNOW. Here that Canadians? We got 3 WHOLE INCHES TODAY. WOO HOO!!

MINDY -

I agree with just about everyting that Lisa said - especially nutrition being a very personal thing. I frequently try to fine-tune my race-day nutrition, and for sprints and olys I seem to have a system that works well for me. As you're looking at a sprint, though, I'll tell you only about that, for now.

I will ingest a gel about 15 minutes before swim start. For the bike I will have a half water bottle with HEED, an electrolyte powder drink made by Hammer Nutrition. Back at t-zone, there will be another gel next to my running stuff, and I will stick that in one of the pockets of my top. I will grab a cup of water at every station, although for most sprints there are just a couple. If the day is really hot or I'm just feeling drained or I'm pushing hard into the red zone, I might use the gel; mostly I don't. And that's it.

Gels vary widely in taste and consistency, and it is worth it to sample across the spectrum. I like "thin" gels, so that is either Lava or AccelGel. Hammer, Cytogel, and Carb-Boom! are a bit thicker, then there is ClifShot, and finally at the thickest end are PowerGel and GU. Curiously, I spent much of last season using GU, especially their new longer-distance variant, Roctane. I felt they worked well for me, and the thickness was not off-putting.

If you are a chocoholic, try AccelGel. The gel division of Accelerade was bought by Cadbury, and the taste of the chocolate AccelGel is as close to a good chocolate bar as you can find. Yummilicious!

Pretty big snow (15-20cm) predicted for tomorrow, so it's back to shoveling. It's been much more cold than snowy here for a couple of weeks, but tomorrow will be a good dose of cross-training in the form of snow-shoveling. (Lots of the other snow-based cross-training recently -- cross-country skiing. Not very intense, as I only classic ski, but if I work moderately hard I can get the heart rate elevated a bit.)

Tomorrow I shall sally firth into the Land of the Logs, see what you troppers are up to. I guess I ought to participate as well, eh? Right now I'm in my 27th straight day of at least one workout, so I don't think I'll try to go retro and post back to when this current string started. (Ahhhhhh! The sweet masses of free-time for the Retired One!)

MINDY -
As for dealing with boredom and/or lack of tunes on race day, remember that there will be a lot of adrenaline coursing through you, as well as lots of people around you, so it all will be a fabulous feast for your senses. You'll be fine!

Steve,

What is your take using heartrate and/or RPE to aid in training? (RPE for anyone completely new reading stands for rate of percieved exertion and is used to help you understand how hard or easy a workout should be)

The plan I am currently using uses a RPE scale of 1-10. The plan is here, RPE descriptions at bottom....
http://www.beginnertriathlete.com/cms/article-detail.asp?articleid=...

I had thought I would try to figure out what my heartrate ranges should be and monitor my rpe that way, but I posted on a forum about it last week and one of the "vets" sent me an email that basically said using heartrate is falling out of favor because it is so hard to nail down, the best bet is to just stick to the rpe descriptions.

traditionally i have been a person who sees "run 40 minutes" on the plan and I just let how I feel once I am out there dictate what pace/rpe I go. often, this is higher than I was supposed to. after reading, it seems like keeping to lower rpe's ( in the base building stages particularly) can help with injury prevention and also helps you to go faster later. it is hard for me to stay rpe 3 when I am feeling great and want to run fast, but i am trying.

so, i am just curious to hear your input. do you use one of these measurements when training? does all this low rpe stuff in training really help you go faster later? because I really want to go faster. that is my number 1 goal this year. I know I can go the distance and finish, but I will not be (completely) happy unless I finish with a good time.

thanks for your input.

lisa

Jess,

i just went to the Mooseman website. looks like your HIM is a week before mine. Did you start your plan last week? I just started Monday, but I know the first two weeks are the same. If you are in week 2 you will have to let me know what i'm in store for each week

LISA -

Great questions, lots of twists and turns by way of answers. So as to rein myself in, I'll use point form. And I'll do the HRM one here, the broader stuff after.
(1) RPE will work well, kind of, and is the best simple measurement for those who don't own a HRM.
(2) The best way to get a handle on one's RPE is to work through a HRM first. If calibrated correctly, and all the baseline "tests" are complted, then a person will know what it feels like when they are in, ay, Zone 4 according to their HRM. In this regard I disagree with the "vet", but....
(3) The comments from the "vet" reflect a common position, as not all HRM are created equally, and how one feels on a given day may not jive with what a HRM records.
(4) As I said to Nathan, mostly I use RPE - or, really, pretty much your approach as stated in the paragraph that begins with "traditionally".
(5) I seldom think in terms of RPE, even. If I'm doing long slow stuff, I know how I should feel when I do that. For speedwork, I know how I should feel with that.
(6) CAVEAT - #5 is not perfect! When I use a HRM on a treadmill, I'm always surprised that my most intense efforts there are ones that I do not bring myself to do outside. That is, even though I feel that I am busting my tail outside, with a high RPE and likely a high heart rate, chances are that it is NOT, in fact, as high as I think it is.
(7) I have never raced using a HRM, as in general I push as hard as I can given how I feel - and I don't need a monitor to tell me that!

So, in summarizing the above, I seldom use my HRM anymore, BUT there were times in my life when it was valuable, and that was when I was more new to things and hadn't grown as in tune with my body as I am now. But, I sense that things have changed some over the past few years, and maybe it's time to revisit my HRM and re-establish my current baselines.

LISA -

There are lots of heated discussions about what type of training works best by way of generating race-season speed!

I have had people tell me that me that the off-season should be spent doing mostly long, slow, distance stuff. I have had people tell me that speedwork year-round is essential, as the more that one "goes fast", the more easily they will be able to generate that speed in a race. I will try to find excatly which recent issue of "Triathlete" had one of the point-counterpoint debates about speedwork versus long slow stuff. It was beteen the editors of "Triathlete" and "Inside Triathlon", and it did a good job of laying out the arguments on both sides.

At an oly this past season, I guy in my a.g. breezed right past me at about mile 4 of the run - no effort displayed, just short compact strides, and WHOOSH! away he went. I talked to him for quite a while after, and he said that he couldn't remember the last time he ran 10k straight. His run workouts ALWAYS include speedwork, so it would be run 2 miles, do strides for a bit, run a couple miles more and then change things up again. In a way, I guess, he is doing random fartleks, and as I understood it he never enters a run with a concrete plan - he'll just change things up as the mood strikes him. He also might just do it according to time - roughly two minutes easy, two minutes hard, however it suits him. And as he so good, I felt I ought to be listening to him VERY carefully!

For me, given my history with injuries, speedwork is risky; even the other day, doing less than two minutes of something roughly speed-oriented, I managed to aggravate both achilles! (This is new for me; my achilles mostly behave.) The guy I just mentioned told me that he seldom gets injured, so for him speedwork is kind of a win-win, I guess. In my case, however, I'm not convinced that the hoped-for benefits exceed the potential risks. In most races I'm one of the top one or two runners in my a.g., and usually in the top 1/4 of all racers, so I maybe allow myself to be a bit complacent about this in accepting what natural abilities I have without risking things to get faster. I am a good runner, but really don't have the stuff to be very good, let alone great. So, I ask myself, why risk injury to reach a point that probably isn't realistically attainable?

Finally, I subscribe to the idea that keeping to lower RPEs during the base phase is a good approach for injury prevention, and I hope that not too many of us here are beating ourselves up with speed sessions at this stage of things. I'm assuming that most of us are coming off some sort of off-season, and our bodies need time to get used to the stresses that we are fixing to place on them. In your example of RPE 3, but wanting to go faster, I think that if you can maintain that pace - and increase it over time and distance - it will work to help you go faster, later, if by no other means than to condition your body to be comfortable with increasing distance. Reagrdless of how fast a person can do a stand-alone 5k, that speed won't help them in a 10k or beyond if they are unaccustomed to those increased distances!

LISA AGAIN! -

Looking at the plan you cited and how it lays out RPE, I think it's a nice slippery slope to go from RPE 3 to RPE 4 ---- if you felt you needed to rationalize picking up the pace a bit. The difference is "easy" to "still easy", and "sweat" to "sweating a bit more". To me, those sound pretty subjective! So I think you are fine to pick it up a bit if you're feeling good and strong.

And remember, the plan you are following is for everyone (this assumption is correct, isn't it?), so it is trying to hone in on a common range that will benefit all without harming any. You have some decent experience behind you, and I suspect you are pretty much in tune with your body and its capabilities, so straying from the plan some shouldn't hurt you at all. Just imagine the range of people who are using that plan, and you know that you have nothing completely in common with them beyond the guidelines of the plan itself!

(And then there are RPE 5 and 6, neither of which has a descriptor. That makes the slope maybe even potentially more slippery - "Sheesh, there I was at 3 and next thing I knew I was at 7!" It would be sort of like getting a speeding ticket: "Really, officer, I was going 78? Last time I looked, I was at 53!")

TO ALL YOU SOUTHERNERS:

Last night I wrote it as "ya'll", thinking of the contraction of "ya all". But is it really "y'all", being a contraction of "you all"?
Man, it's not easy being a southern poser!!

LISA -

Good workout day: Starting the run at RPE 3, finding yourself at RPE 7 at the end.
Bad workout day: Starting the run at RPE 7, struggling to finish at RPE 3.

MINDY -

Much obliged, m'am!

And on the nutrition topic:
One of the absolute best things that you can do with any disposable income you might have is to experiement with different gels in the off-season, especially if you are mostly unfamiliar with them. As most gel-makers produce a vanilla and a chocolate, choose whichever of those flavors appeals most to you, and find a place that sells as many brands as possible. Then, buy across the board - say, a vanilla by them, and them, and them, and them. And now you're all ready for a unique taste-test, which will tell you (a) which company produces a consistency you can enjoy, and (b) which company can produce a taste that is most true to what your taste buds require. That is likely the company that will work well for you using all the other flavors. Bon appetit!

Beyond taste and consistency, the "basics" are the same - serving sizes are comparable, carbohydrate levels are comparable. What differ, however, are some of the finer points, such as which electrolytes are included and their proportionate amounts, and the "sugar" source - maltodextrin, fructose, brown rice syrup, etc. For some people this all matters; for others, they are just looking at a quick"hit" of carbs and electrolytes. For shorter distance races (and training sessions as well), the fine details are not as important as they become at longer distances.

Lisa is 100% correct that you shouldn't try anything like this for the first time at a race, so that's why it's good to experiment between now and then. And it's also possible that what tastes okay when you're sitting around reading, will be absolutely repulsive under the duress of racing or doing a workout. For me, I often "shut-down" to the idea of gels at levels at or above half-irons.....and that is not ideal. Usually as a half progresses, I need to rely on what is at aid stations, and I become more and more dependent on liquids as opposed to gels. Frequently, I will finish a race with gels in my pockets, ones that I either started the run with or picked up along the way "just in case".

Finally, don't give up on gels if they seem sickatating initially - for many people, they are very much an acquired taste. Honest!