Penn State's mentor group - CLOSED! (Page 70)

Great Job on the improvement Greg! 

Seeing that 20 mph avg on the bike sure looks alot better than the teens doesn't it ?

wow greg that is really fantastic! you hit the 20.0 mph mark!!!! really great work!

For those that haven't seen it in the other forum... Fred qualified for Kona with that performance!!! Awesome job Fred! Unfortunately he wasn't at the ceremony to accept it.  I'm sure he'll get it again at IMLP though.

http://www.beginnertriathlete.com/discussion/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=212665&posts=5&start=1
 

wow. even better job fred haha!!

Kona qual is awesome!  Great job Fred.

Great job on the races this weekend. Awesome job Greg on the new PR on the course. I think it's cool that we can do the same course year after year and see the positive progresion.

Wow Fred. Holy cow that is awesome. I know that you have been training very hard but smart and that has prepared you for where you are at. I guess IMLP will be a good warm up for Kona.

I can't wait to read the race reports on the races.

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Edited by PennState 2010-06-14 6:19 AM

Got in 195 miles of training in Lake Placid this past weekend.  Despite being wet and cold for a good chunk of our 100+ mile ride on Saturday I had a blast.  There's just something that's REALLY awesome about working so hard towards something (getting to Lake Champlain) and being rewarded by some of the best scenic views that Mother Nature has... we worked our tails to get up a hill called "Cemetary Rd" (there was not ONE cemetary on it!) and eventually we hit a descent on a recently paved road, no cars, no death grip on the aerobars...and the trees parted and *BAM!* there was Lake Champlain in all her glory.  Found a deli on the water and had a slice of the first pizza ever made there (they just opened recently)...something really cool about that. =)

...Now... how to get pizza in my special needs bag for the ride on race day...

 Maybe they call it cemetary hill because it puts the average cyclist into the grave  Congrats on the virgin pizza.  Sounds like a great weekend of training.

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I'm almost ready to talk about... tapering!

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I'll throw my 2 cents into the pacing discussion.  The first 10k race I did was in the middle of a semester when I was taking exercise physiology with a lab... all the labs we did + the knowledge of the two professors taught me that my body CAN handle pushing harder.  I had a kick butt time (for me) for my first race because I knew my mind wanted to give up before my body would.  However, I don't plan on pushing myself like that for IMLP.

Tapering... I had swim coaches that thought tapering meant doing 4,000-5,000 yard practices to maaaaybe 2,000 yard practices the week before the last big race.  Then we'd go through fine tuning all the glitches in our strokes we were racing.  I sucked at each race.

So, fast forward and my last coach believed in low volume and HIGH AS YOU FREAKING CAN GO intensity with LOTS of recovery.  I think I'm going to try and figure out how to do this during the last two weeks before IMLP for the swim and bike... screw the run... I just gotta do the mileage to be race ready, but no intensity. 

First off, wasn't Lake Champlain where Benedict Arnold held held the British off (he was actually a great leader, not so much on the loyalty side though) during the Revolution?  

Sorry, I'm a history nut

I used to have a run coach and he had the opposite opinion on tapering.  No intensity, just maintain form and run frequently at a lower intensity.  His theory was that you don't get any gains from workouts until about 3 weeks so intensity training is just an injury risk with no benefit.

This is basically what I have always believed.  Any workout you do will not show itself in your fitness for about 2 weeks.  Since we are talking about tapering I'll assume it's meant only in terms of your A priority race.  Because otherwise the high intensity WILL have a benefit for your next race.

In terms of what I do for a taper... I think people go about it the wrong way a lot of times.  I think too many people drop intensity and volume during their taper in a declining line.  I think what people forget is that during the course of our training we have been teaching our bodies that their is a cycle in our training with highs and lows.  Your body gets used to working hard, resting and repeating that cycle.  Not just with physically performing, but also with your nutrition intake.  It appears that a lot of people's taper (I'm guilty of this in the past myself) is just to drag out that last recovery period.  Which I think can cause issues in itself because your body was expecting to get worked hard(er) again after just a few days.  So you taper off over 2 weeks... after 2-3 days your body is wondering why it's not having to perform, the nutrition you've been taking in to recover properly is now getting stored, you keep eating during the taper and not burning enough of it, your body then gets used to this lower volume/lower intensity workload, stops storing as much nutrition and then you want it to perform on race day.

I know a number of people (myself included) that have taken that approach and found myself feeling sluggish when I tried to push hard on race day.  My body just didn't expect to have to do it anymore, I had taught it over the last 2 weeks that I was going to start taking it easy.

I was at the San Diego marathon expo where they were interviewing a couple top notch runners, two old school guys (last american to win Boston, some olympian from '74, and a younger guy) and they got on the subject of tapering.  Both the old school guys and the younger guy basically said the same thing.. you need to give yourself more recovery, decrease your volume, but you don't want to break your training cycle, instead you want to time your training cycle so that come race day, your body is expecting a hard workout.  They also all mentioned that they would NEVER take the day off before a big race, if there was a day to take off, it would be like 3 days before.. the final days leading up to a race needs to remind your body that there's still work to be done.

I listened to those guys and realized that the times I had done that unintentionally (ie. for races I was "training through" but still decreased my volume in the week leading up) I actually performed extremely well and usually felt great during those races.  The big races that I've tapered off and didn't maintain some intensity are the ones I tended to not feel too strong during.  If I feel strong during a race, I'll perform great, if I don't feel strong, then my performance shows it.

Not that I'm setting any world records, but a great quote I heard from a pro female marathoner oncw was something like: "World Records are broken on the days that things seem to just come easy for you, the days when you felt great and everything just felt right while you were doing it."  

If you can figure out your personal cycle of training when your training days feel like that and make it occur on race day... you'll have one of your best races.

I know there's a lot of theories of how and when to taper, but like many other things in this sport... what works for one person won't always work for the next.  I'm going to try to cycle my training and train through my races the next couple months, then try to keep that cycle going with a taper into the Boulder 70.3 in August and see if it works for me. 

So I'll post a little update on what's going on...

Today I had my 2nd session with the swim coach and I posted my fastest 100y ever; 1:36!  The good thing is that I can improve and I'm going to try to go sub 1:30 by the time I leave the OC (cue theme music).  I know this is slow but I've only been swimming for 13 months or so.

My long term goal is to hold a 1:35/100y pace in long distance ows.

On the bike, I've put in a few PR days and I can honestly look at my numbers and say I'm 2 mph faster than I was in May, or even last year.  I still haven't hit the elusive 20/20 (20 mph in 20 miles) mark but I'm pretty sure I can hit it right now if I tried.   

The good thing is I feel like I am no where near my ceiling in the swim or bike.  I can improve alot in both sports.

I'm still rehabbing the calf / achilles, and the calf raises really help.  I miss running (its my favorite of the three) but I want to do this right.  I tried the aggressive approach and it cost me dearly.  When I started lifting, my left calf felt numb/weak, and now it feels almost as strong as the right.  I should be able to start running soon.

The bad is I with all the great things I've been doing I keep reminding myself of the negatives that's happened recently.  Not too sure how to block it out either.  Despite my feelings, its been a really good month.

Edited by furiousferret 2010-06-15 12:48 AM

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I have to admit that tapering is one of the things I feel least comfortable with in terms of training.

I've been drinking the coolaid that for my A race at 140.6 miles I need a full 3 week taper for optimal results.

But I've also experienced the phenomenon above of feeling sluggish when I've tapered for an A race and having an outstanding day when I've "trained through" a race but just cut the volume back for a few days leading up to it.

My training also doesn't have cycles where I take recovery weeks, so my body isn't really used to that (although life forced me to have one recently).  I go for the consistent/repeatable model, which I believe offers the same or more fitness benefits with far less recovery needs (and injury risk).  I think a lot of people's "taper" is actually "extended recovery" from all the [slighhtly too much] work they've been doing.

In the absence of having a significant recovery need, it leads me towards considering a much shorter taper, even for an A race.  Basically I would simply drop the distance of my long run and long ride starting a few weeks out, but otherwise train at the same volume/consistency I have been up until the week before the race, where I would back it off some.

Very interested in your thoughts.  I think there should be a HUGE connection between your overall training philosophy and your tapering practices.

Edited by JoshKaptur 2010-06-15 9:19 AM

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Edited by PennState 2010-06-15 9:18 AM

I'm suprirsed (and pleased) that the 3 week taper seems to be falling out of favor, at least among those commenting here.