triathlon recovery

October 20, 2014

Dealing with the Off Season

I don’t know about you, but my body gets a little beaten up over the course of a triathlon season. For 95% of my life I haven’t done these things, and I still feel a constant nag to rest.

It’s like hibernation theory and I am ready to snore.

I was noodling around and found this article about 5 Off Season Rules on Competitor.com that has some nice points. Here’s a summary:

1. Their first rule is don’t run a marathon in January. Their basic point is that doing long distance training in your recovery season is a great way to get injured or burned out.

2. Focus on short/intense workouts. They say volume is easy to add back in later and now is the time to boost your power and lactate threshold.

3. Gain Weight. The point being when you train at a heavier weight it makes you stronger. They even go as far as saying eat ice cream sundaes before bed.

4. Swim, swim, swim. They argue that swimming is usually the weakness of most triathletes and the best way to perfect the most technical sport is to practice. The suggestion is to swim every day for 10-14 days, which I completely agree with because it worked for me (though I did it “in-season”).

5. Hit the weights. “You’ve spent the season breaking down the house, now it’s time to repair it.”

For me, this sounds like a good plan. One of my major goals for this off season is to create muscle balance, so I plan to at a ton of yoga into this mix as well. And of course Little Debbie.

July 15, 2014

My Ironman Secret Strategy . . . Exposed #IMLou

Dealing With Guilt

I take a lot of shit for “sleeping in” and “milking” my recovery. Frankly, it riddles me with guilt and that’s not good when your big race is only 40 days away.

Monday I took a long look into my red eyes and made a firm commitment to increase pool time by getting up earlier. It’s the first event and a body adjusted to early morning water is a prepared body.

I’m calling it “Forty Days of Floating.” This will be a daunting challenge and require more recovery discipline than I’m used to, but sometimes you have to man-up with the fact that Ironman is a sacrifice.

The honest reason, of course, is that I want to have a solid tan for Louisville. Not only will my skin wrinkle sooner, the sexy race medal will pop in my Finisher’s Photo.

Another small benefit will be added exposure to heat and reduced odds of sunburn. We all know how sensitive skin can tangle a run to the podium.

And what’s a good plan without accountability? That’s right, a failure. So, I’m graciously including a daily selfie (see below) that will help document my aggressive recovery and changing skin tones.

Ongoing Nightmare

So recovery is settled, what about rest?

I’ve been on this planet for 50 years and still haven’t figured out the trick to waking up early. Patience is wearing thin.

My loose goal at Louisville is to be in the swim line by 6:45 am sharp, but with my current sleep habits, I am in serious jeopardy of missing the race. I’ve had nightmares of running down that pier alone and jumping in the water as they’re pulling up the timing strip. Risky business, but it would certainly go viral, and we all know that’s the key.

Screw Your Fancy Toys

Everyone says there are 4 disciplines in triathlon: Swim, bike, run, and nutrition. I am here to tell you there are six, and the blue-haired step children, Rest and Recovery, are screaming for my attention.

So, today’s Crushing Iron lesson is: Instead of dishing out big bucks for a power meter, you may want invest 400 in a real success tool, like this beauty below.

[follow_me]

May 28, 2014

My First Day of 10 Days of Rest

I started my 10 Days of Rest yesterday, but that doesn’t mean I’m being lazy. I think it’s important to restate that this will be intense mind and body work to rebuild my foundation. I will be very active in my relaxation.

Last night I performed a fairly intense cycle of stretching and strengthening exercises. The base of the stretching is from Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Body book, and can be seen performed by this young man or look at this picture for a sample.

The first thing I learned (which I already knew) was that I am super tight in my pelvis and hip flexors. This is a major problem, and whether it’s true or not, I think it is basically the root of my plantar facetious (not to mention strain and stress in general). It sounds strange, but my heel is measurably better today after spending about 30 minutes with these exercises last night.

I also did a handful of planks only to realize, not only am I tight, I am weak! Crazy how you can workout so much and feel like a you can’t fight your way out of a paper bag.

Triathlon was the perfect cross train discovery for my running woes, now I realize I need to cross train the cross train. Triathlon makes you very straight-ahead-easy-pace-strong, but doesn’t round out the body as much as I need. It’s those same, repetitive motions that build the same muscles. When I was going good last season, I was doing yoga at least twice a week, along with leg exercises that worked unused muscles. But, time is a rare commodity in triathlon and something as simple as 30 minutes to invest in your long-term success becomes expendable.

So, I have no idea if this experiment will pay off, but my gut is telling me it will. It’s a little risky to drop all endurance training for 10 days at this time of the season, but health is the key to fitness and I’m hoping this slight detour will get me there faster.

I’ll probably repeat this routine a couple times today, then add some Beso ball step-ups and balance stuff, along with a full round of yoga. I’m also looking forward to incorporating a bunch of plank varieties along with push ups and modified pull ups.

Obviously this is far deeper than training. Last year’s Ironman training knocked me off a lazy and directionless foundation, and now I’m working on putting these pieces together in a way that makes sense. The “excitement” WAS Ironman. Now, I feel like I’m looking for that deep and genuine place in training (and life) that fuels me on a more natural and consistent level. Pure excitement for the day ahead, period.

April 18, 2014

Ironman Pain and Recovery #IMNOLA

The morning after Ironman Wisconsin I laid in bed and took inventory. I lifted my arms, circled my ankles, and stretched my legs. I’d never done anything remotely close to 140.6 miles, and getting out of bed scared the shit out of me.

I sat on the edge looking down at the floor for about 5 minutes. Should I try to walk, or just fall to my knees and crawl to the bathroom? I decided to trust my legs, and what happened next was just short of remarkable.

Other than stabbing heel pain and a general tenderness, I felt fine. Sure, I moved slowly, but that’s no different than most mornings. I was physically drained, but the very next day I felt great swimming a 1,000 meters in Turtle Lake. It’s just weird, and quite amazing, how much the body can handle.

This brings me back to Sunday in New Orleans.

From mile one of the run, I felt like my body was done, cooked, stewed in a Cajun goulash. I just “couldn’t” run the entire 13.1 miles. I was weak, battered, beaten. But somehow, I completely ran the last 4 miles after intermittent walk/runs. Then came the morning.

It felt exactly like Wisconsin. I limped toward the bathroom, but after 10 minutes, I was fine. I walked all over New Orleans that day and the only tough part was getting up after sitting a while.

On Tuesday I drove 8 hours back to Nashville and was full of energy that night. I literally forgot I had just raced a Half Ironman.

All of this got me thinking.

Obviously my body was “ready” for 70.3 miles, but somewhere in there my mind convinced me it wasn’t. I couldn’t find a “reason” to push through the pain. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I hadn’t been writing about training much. I hadn’t been thinking about how I would deal with the stress of the race, or why I wanted to do it in the first place.

I was also training alone. I didn’t surround myself with like minded people to inspire and push me. Group training is great for accountability, but I think its biggest advantage comes from keeping your head straight. It creates mental momentum and helps you believe. It’s very hard to live alone on an island.

Moving forward, I have two commitments to make. One is writing more, the other is working out with friends and groups. So much of this is mental and if you try tackling a full or half Ironman without being focused, you are sunk.

Don’t get me wrong, there are hundreds of variables regarding recovery that include nutrition, rest, training, etc, but I think most of us can get a huge advantage from simply being mentally prepared for what you’ll face before, during, and after the race.

The day after Ironman New Orleans, I joined my mom and her friends for a paddle boat ride. I sat in peace, gazing at the swirling water, taking in the glory of the Mighty Mississippi. But I kept having a strange thought, what would happen if the boat sank?

Hysteria.

Hundreds of people scrambling for their lives. I calculated the distance to the shore, and plotted how I would save those around me. Hauling one on each leg like a pull buoy, using the current to guide us to the nearest plot of land. It gave me an eery confidence. I had a plan and felt good about it. I visualized what it would take, and I was ready.

We would not sink.