Penn State's mentor group - CLOSED! (Page 71)

My thoughts on the taper is very close to yours Fred.  A couple of points I will make from my own experience.  I think a lot of age groupers (myself included in the past) over do the taper due to the mental fatigue of weeks of training and trying to train and fit in life's other obstacles.  Unfortunately many of these people have only been hitting 80 - 90 % of the planned training and hit the same percentage of the scheduled taper which in my thoughts is probably starting to far away from the goal race. 

Something else I have read recently on tapering, I think it was in Triathlete Magazine, was that the ability to s/b/r long is lost faster than the ability to s/b/r fast.  In other words endurance is lost faster than speed.  I experienced this in my last marathon training nursing a nagging hamstring issue, so it made some sense to me.  Now this doesn't mean that a week before your A race you should do your longest run of the training plan, but it does mean that you don't drop to 5 mile long runs 3 weeks out if you are training for a marathon or Ironman.  A taper should allow for more opportunity to rest, overall volume should be reduced, but training doesn't end. 

PennState - 2010-06-16 7:56 PM No tri club for me. I do train with a good group of guys in town on a semi-consistent basis. For today's training, I got a 50 mile ride in. Anyone else?

Traveling for work, got a early morning swim in and a run in this evening.  Looking to get a bike ride in tomorrow.

zionvier - 2010-06-17 2:56 AM

furiousferret - 2010-06-16 7:12 PM

PennState - 2010-06-16 5:56 PM No tri club for me. I do train with a good group of guys in town on a semi-consistent basis. For today's training, I got a 50 mile ride in. Anyone else?

Roughly 2k swim this morning.  First time in an Olympic pool, first time swimming with a masters group.  I didn't actually swim with them just got put off to the side and did some of the drills the coach told me to.  I'm getting a lot of good information to improve my stroke.

I'll probably swim and run tonight since we were kept late =\
 

What did you think about the masters group?  There is one a mile from my house that meets weekly, but I haven't ever gone.  I've always got the impression they were focused on pure swimming and not swimming for triathlon.  I've always viewed masters classes as trying to make you faster, where I'm looking to get better at swimming in order to conserve energy.  Do you think the masters groups are something an IMer should do? 

The masters group I swim with, when I can, is mostly swimmers that also do tri's.  From reading some of the swimming threads here on BT, it would appear that each group is different, so I would talk to the coach or attend once and see.   My group does a lot of different workouts, some longer sets, some short sprints.  When I was training for my last IM, I did masters twice a week and swam on my own for the endurance sets.  I'm not sure that fast swimming and efficient swimming are neccesarily different goals.