ADollar79's Group--closed and in the base building phase! (Page 9)

I am pretty comfortable in open water, as I did my first mile swim when I was 12 (Boy Scouts) and after that, I thought I could swim to Australia if I wanted to.  When I was 15 or so I had my sisters trail me in a life raft across this lake that our family used to go to and I swam across it and back to the beach.  Caused quite a stir as one of the Corps of Engineers guys saw me and alerted everyone to what I was doing just in case I needed to be saved.  My youngest sister ran and got my Mom from the campground and she almost killed me when I came out of the water.  It was probably a mile and a quarter total.  The Ranger was worried because I was swimming right past the mouth of the dam where the lake dumps out to the river (I didn't really understand the mechanics of water and dams at that point in my life).  When I was a Marine, we swam in open water all of the time as part of our combat exersizes and I got my Scuba certification which requires a lot of OWS when you get it in the military. 

My only concern with racing OWS is the waves coming in on ocean swims as you are going out and getting through them efficiently.  It seems to me that on the sprint races, the person that gets through that the quickest has a serious advantage, no?

Bob (or Baaaaaaab) is a kickass athlete that we cheered on at IM WI.  Myself, Trixie, Zilla and Regimom were all dressed up like clowns and had honking horns (go to my albums for pictures).  We just honk at each other all the time.  And there is a lot of perverse humor in it too.    

ScotinSeattle - 2008-01-09 12:31 AM I meant to add. What does an LT test involve? I just wikipedia'd it and it sounds really complicated. There are a LOT of things I still don't understand about this sport.

 This is why we have mentoring threads  

***caution...LT is a very confusing concept.  It is very important to the sport BUT for most beginners it may not make the world of difference.  If all this goes over your heads, don't worry.  I am more than happy to talk about it all you want.  However, I feel the best thing you can do is just get out there and train consistently!!! *** 

LT is lactate threshold.  It is generally viewed as the point in which your body switches from aerobic to anaerobic excises and is unable to flush the lactic acid from your muscles.  You are only able to maintain you LT pace for so long. 

Many athletes undertake an LT test to determine both heartrate zones and training paces.  Generally, training plans are developing around intensity (i.e.  run 10' at 85%).  The idea is to train and race at a pace well below LT because your body can go forever.   

What Sarah did (correct me if I am wrong) was an LT swim test.  After a warmup (200 in this case).  She did an all out 1000y time trial (TT) swim.  She will then take this time and divide it by 100 to determine her T-pace (threshold pace).  Her T-Pace will become the benchmark for her swimming.  

So for example:

Sarah swims 1000y in 20 minutes, her T-pace is 2:00/100 y.  Her workout for tomorrow might say something like this--

300y warmup
4x200y at t-pace + 20"  

So she will swim the 4x200 at 2:20/100y or 4:40 for the 200y.  

Does this make sense?  While getting faster is the key for all of us, you do NOT get faster by training faster all the time.  It is a difficult concept to understand, but you get faster by going slower.  

The same can be done for running and biking.  I generally find that swimming relies less on heartrate and more on pace.  Running can be measured by pace or heartrate.  Biking is generally measured by heartrate or wattage (via powermeter)

I hear she is a professional athlete.  Didn't she do IM WI?  I followed her training and that course was hers! 

^^^^ she is whack ^^^^

Ocean swimming is by far the most difficult.  The only thing that come close is a choppy lake (a la IM CDA)  You will often see people doing dolphin dives in the shallow parts of the water to jump over waves.  The key is to figure out the rhythm of the waves so that you can set up your breathing properly.  This is why bilateral breathing is critically important.  The last thing you want is a wave hitting you when you come up to breath.  Been there, done that...it sucks, lol. 

Anytime you have an ocean swim, I recommend arriving a few days early because you will want to experiment.  Though conditions can change each day, you need to consider what effect the undertow has.  I swam a lap at Ironman Florida this year and I was shocked how hard it was for me to return to shore WITH the waves.  I looked at my splits and in fact the undertow aided me going out but I was fighting it on the return.  Of course, the benefit of a race is that you will have dozens to hundreds in front of you creating a draft for you   

Oh no, we're on page 2! Gotta fix that    Hi guys!! I came to confess that I have slacked off tremendously yesterday and today.  Gotta get back on the horse. 

I did take my bike to the bike shop tonight to get my fit adjusted.  We traded out the stem (I think that's right, the thing the handlebars are attached to) so that it would come up a little higher.  We also switched my saddle out to one that I'm going to road test this weekend.  I love my bike shop.  Got my new pedals and pump to carry as well (it's so tiny! for carrying in my jersey pocket).  

Because I am concerned that the LT and HR discussion isn't as relevant to everyone and might confuse others, I wanted to share another site that is likely to make your head spin. 

http://www.runbayou.com/jackd.htm

This is a site for calculating your V-Dot for running.  V-Dot is similar to heartrate zones.  It breaks down your pace into easy and moderate paces for training to give you a better sense of where you should be on your runs.  

So for instance, if I can do a 22:00 5k then my data looks like this:

Easy pace:  9:27/ mile
Marathon pace: 8:06/ mile
Threshold pace: 7:33 / mile
Interval pace:  1:44 / quarter mile

It also gives you come predictions for other distances.  

My point is if you don't have an HRM or don't want to train my LT or HR, this is a fairly reliable method to getting understanding pace.  

Hope everyone has a great weekend.   

This calculator will not work for me.  I run about a 38 minute 5k - I know that is slow - and anything above 30:40 returns an error message saying "could not find a suitable VDot based on your input values". 

Interesting.  It seems as low as you can go is a 30 score for a v-dot (which is 12:30 mile).  Sorry about that.  I might send them an email this weekend to see what their rationale is behind it. 

I bet we have you with a vdot by the time your first race comes around.  

You have got to know by now that I am not near that patient

Had a run today - why do I feel like a slacker when I run 6.5? It's bad when you get used to running longer distances on Saturdays! I will be out of town next weekend, so I'll have to make up 17 on my own. That will be fun.

I also picked up the best best best bike jersey ever in the history of mankind. My bike's name is Cupcake (or CC at races when I want to sound tougher) and cupcakes are my game.  (If you've ever been to my blog, you'll know that). 

(cupcake jersey.jpg)

(jersey back.jpg)

Andrew - I know we kind of touched on this before, but the end of this month represents the end of my couch to sprint program.  There is a taper built into that program for the last week before a race.  Should I blow that taper off and replace that with some harder workouts, or work through that and then start the sprint to Oly training.  I was thinking of doing an on my own sprint to handle some of the jitters and nutrition questions.  I have been practicing nutrition things during workouts (the GU gel works great for me and causes no stomach distress at all) but I had to get rid of the accelerade as it did cause me some stomach problems.  The sprint to Oly plan is 12 weeks- and I have 21 weeks with two races in between before my Oly (which is my "A" race).  I am not really sure which plan to pick for the Oly.  Running is by far my weakest event, with swimming next and biking last. 

Discuss amongst yourselves ---  let me know.

John, 

Let me ask a few questions.  How are you feeling with all the workouts?  Are they too easy?  Too hard?  How is your intensity?  

If you look at the first week of the next training plan, does the volume look more or less than you are currently doing? 
 

I like the idea of doing a trial run where you slowly go through transition thinking of all the small things to do.  I wouldn't try to race anywhere near 100% just slow and steady

And remind me the dates of your OLY races.... 

John, I'm in the same boat with finding the right Oly plan, I've sort of been fumbling through this month and have one scheduled to start in Feb for a Apr 27th race. 

Dollar - exactly! It's definitely uh, outrageous.  

I hope this week is better for everyone.  I got totally derailed last weekend and need to get my act together.
 

Weekly workouts....

MON: AM Yoga/ PM 3000y swim
TUES: AM Weights / 40m LT run
WED:  AM Yoga/ 20m run/ Spinervals
THURS: AM Weights/ 45m run
FRI:  AM Yoga/ 2500swim
SAT:  2h long run
SUN:  35 mile ride in the mountains/ 30m run
 

word. I was a total slacker last week.  this week is going to be interesting. I'm taking a half day on Friday before we go out of town - have to do a 17 miler all by my lonesome.  

Well, vacation was pretty much amazing.  Although, I didn't get any runs in.  We were told that it was only safe to walk within a three block radius of our hotel.  Yeah, that would make for an exciting run.  On the upside, we worked on two houses for some amazing Honduran families and managed to have a little fun in the middle.  I will definitely be doing another Habitat for Humanity trip, and hopefully soon.

The plan for the week:

Get back to it....nice and slow.

Welcome back, Kendra.  I was missing you - in a "not creepy" kind of way.

OK - I don't think the workouts are too easy - yet I don't have an incredibly hard time finishing them.  The biking workouts are the easiest for me.  The swimming workouts are fine, except I still have some issues (read doubts) about being able to swim for the entire Oly distance as well as keeping up the pace that I want to for the Sprint distance (1 is 400 and 1 is 300).  Basically, by the time I get to the end of a 200 meter swim, I can feel myself losing form.  Running is another story.  I feel like I struggle at it immensely.  I mean - I can run at the pace I am currently running (12:45) for at least an hour, so that is like 4.7 miles, but I would really like to be faster and I have not done this all in succesion, so I have some qualms about that.  My longest sprint run is actually 4 miles (April 19th), so that is pushing it.  I am pretty sure that I can take care of the issue of endurance with longer runs (say adding 10% every week to my longest run), so that will probably take care of itself (stop saying be patient, Andrew).  As far as intensity goes, the swimming and running are fairly intense.  Biking is another story as I seem to have more of a problem with my legs getting tired than my heart rate getting too high.  To get my heart rate up, I have to spin at some pretty high RPM (100+) and to do that, I have to be in some fairly easy gearing.  I can keep my RPM up to 85-95 in the higher gears (big/12-15), but my legs start to wear out more than my heart rate advances as I bring the RPM up enough to get my heart pumping.  I don't know how much of a racing issue that is.  Truly, I can ride forever, but I would like to do so as if I were trying to get somewhere. 

As far as the plans go - I think I would be OK with any of the plans - they would push me but I am OK with it and feel I could do the complete workout - except the Beginner or Intermediate Olympics that are listed as needing 1 year of Olympic base as a pre-requisite.

From what I can tell on the others, I could do the workouts.  The original workout I was leaning towards was the Sprint to Olympic Bridge - only because it seemed like the natural progression.  It is a 12 week program.

My Oly is on June 22nd.

Ok...there is a lot going on in that email.  I will start with the initial question regarding plans.  I think you should stick with the sprint to Oly bridge plan.  Given that it is only 12 weeks, it will leave you well short of your race.  That isn't a bad thing.  It gives you the opportunity to evaluate where you are with your training.  Can you run 6.2 miles, can you swim 1500 comfortably, etc.  If not, then you have time. 

You have several options when the plan ends.  You can back up the plan and repeat weeks 7-12(?) to get you to your race.  Or you can begin looking at the other beginner plans and likely make the substitute.  Does this all make sense???

---------

A few other things from your post.

BE PATIENT!!!!!!!!       

 Trust me.  It is the hardest thing to learn in this sport.  If you look at my training, one of the things I suspect is that I got impatient with training and tried to go too far....too fast.  I have hit a wall.  You don't want that.  There is a mantra in this sport that it is better to be 10% UNDERtrained than 1% OVERtrained.  I believe that 100%

Your swim will come along.  While it is important to focus on endurance, your entire workout counts for something....just believe in it.  During Ironman training last year, the swim was my #1 concern.  No way I could do 2.4 miles.  That is something like 4300 yards.  My longest to date was half of that.  I NEVER....I repeat NEVER came close to swimming 4300 straight in a workout.  In fact, I don't think I ever swam more than 1500 at a time.  Now, my workouts would call for 40-4500y in the total workout.  I never hit more than 3500.  But come race day, I had put in the work and never questioned if I had the stamina or endurance to finish.  

The MOST important thing you can do as a beginner is train consistently and build your base.  You don't need to worry about getting fast yet.  Speed comes when you develop as strong running/biking base.  Until then, you risk injury by speeding up. 

Also, consider tracking your results.  If you run the same loop frequently, load the route into BT route tracker and you can look at the history of the run.  Are you getting faster, etc.   

Just curious....

Are any of you morning workout people?  I am trying to make the transition to mornings so that I can fit in spin and master swim classes.  I always forget how difficult it is to get over this initial bump.   

Absolutely not...but I might have to be in a week or so.  *grrrr*