Archive for January, 2007
Well, I attempted my first “Masters Swim” workout this evening… and I have to admit it was a total bust. I went to one of Seattle’s several local city owned pools that offer evening “Masters Swim Workouts”. The headline is this program is not for me. I am going to try to find a better alternative, and I will give the concept of masters swims another chance… which is to say, I will look for a program that works for me. But this particular program didn’t cut it for me.
This is how the program was billed… “Masters Workout is a structured workout led by experienced instructors/coaches designed to help you get in shape, stay in shape, or prepare for an important swim meet. Workouts are for adults 18 and older.” I was particularly interested in the “led by experienced instructor/coaches” part. But, what I found was not quite what I expected.
First of all, I will admit that I was really intimidated by the concept. I mean, of course I understand the basics of “sets” and “interval training”. I’ve done this sort of training for running and cycling, and I’ve even done some sets on my own at my gym. But the idea of a bunch of other swimmers in the same lane as you all following the same set definitely makes me feel under pressure. I know I’m a slow swimmer, and I don’t want to hold up the group. Plus, I admit, running intervals make more sense to me, but swimming intervals seem to have a language of their own. Here were some of the things I overheard or was told tonight: “100s on the 1:30″, “we’re gonna do 35’s”, “we’re pushing off on the 1:20″, “if you get behind just drop a 50″. Bleh! It’s all Greek to me.
This program has 6 lanes and apparently each lane is supposed to be a different speed. The far left two lanes were “on the 1:45″; the middle two “were much faster”; the two lanes on the right were “the slow lanes”. Ok, that sounds reasonable… what is my pace I was asked… “Well, I know I can swim a 40min mile.”, I said… “uh, what? I can’t do that math in my head”, was the reply. Needless to say, I scurried off to the slow lane.
The other problem was, there was no coach, no instructor, nothing. There was a life guard, which I guess is good because the pool had a true “deep end” but still, there wasn’t anyone there to get advice from. So really I don’t see the difference between this approach and just doing intervals from a book at my gym.
Alright, so I took the plunge I tried it out, but without a coach, I don’t think I’m gonna get any value from it. So I’ll look for a program with a coach. I’ll let you know what I find… in the mean time, more laps at 40min/mile pace.
January 31st, 2007
It was an absolutely beautiful day in Seattle, and my DSL was down at my house… so I couldn’t get much work done. No fear, I am self-employed, I only report to myself, so I decided to go out and enjoy the weather and get some good training in.
As strange as it may seem, I have been meaning to practice eating. What? Yep, you heard me right… the one error I feel I made on my Ironman last year was my race-day nutrition, and so this season, I want to practice “race day” eating techniques. Since I was heading out around noon, it seemed like a perfect chance to get in a little “practice eating”.
I had two problems with my Ironman race day nutrition. The first was that I bonked at mile 60 of the bike. I know this was because I hadn’t fueled during the first half of the bike. Everything I’ve read on Iron distance race day nutrition says it is critical to fuel early and often on the bike leg. I knew this, I had reminded myself of this, I had plenty of fuel on my bike, but I just didn’t execute. I was so excited about my swim time (18 minutes faster than my goal) and passing all the people on the bike (>50% of the field) that I just got absorbed in the moment and only ate maybe 2 gu packets and no solid food.
Not only did this result in a bonk, but it also created problem #2… uh, did he say #2… yeah. Well, long distance endurance racing is a dirty business, and well, improper fueling can (and in my case did) lead to issues in your GI tract… in my case this meant a very unpleasant feeling and the need to relieve myself at miles 8 and 18 of the marathon. Now, fortunately I didn’t make a mess of myself… but the fact is, running with grumbling bowels is no fun, and it doesn’t help make for your best performance. I know that this problem was also created by poor fueling strategy. I didn’t eat solid foods, so basically all those calories from fluids and gus were just sloshing around through my entire digestive tract.
So this year, I plan to practice eating on the bike, just like I practice my T1’s and T2’s every chance I get, I am going to practice eating. But wait… that sounds like a problem, like a big problem.
I am absolutely convinced that over eating during training is a big limiter in performance. Now, under-eating is also a problem as highlighted by this post on askatricoach.com But, I’ve seen other cyclists and triathletes out there who simply pound tons and tons of calories on their training rides, and also tend to bonk more frequently than me… and I rarely take on calories during training rides. Alright, alright, I don’t want to get into the details of how to handle in-ride nutrition for training in general, that’s not the point of this post… maybe someday I will do some more research and try to present a fair and balanced view of your options and things you should consider. But here is what I know for myself… I can’t afford to eat a ton on my training rides, and so if I’m going to practice eating, I want to do it in a very deliberate race-focused manner, and thoughtfully considering my overall nutritional needs.
The good news is, this was a lunch time ride. I was just about to eat lunch anyway… so I killed two birds with one stone. I made myself a peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwich. I cut it in half, packed it in two easy to open wax paper bags, and loaded it in to my bento-box. What? Why? Does that make sense?
Well, I don’t know if it makes sense or not, but here was my logic…
- Solid food - I know that on race day I want solid food. The gu almost killed me. I need the fiber.
- Peanut butter - Protein and Carbs! Good stuff for long distance nutrition.
- Bananas - Carbs, electrolytes, and “that magical thing bananas do”… uh, you know, bind you up a little…. just in case my tummy gets queasy from the gu later in the race.
- Honey - ahh.. nice unprocessed nature made energy.
- Total calories - about 400… give or take… I would obviously need a lot more than this on race day, but the point is this would have been 3-4 gu packs, which would have been more difficult to eat, and less enjoyable, and not had the added benefits listed above.
- Tastes great! - need I say more?
I actually tried out the wax paper bags vs. plastic bags on an early practice eat… the wax bags worked much better. They held the food in great, and they are easy to open when flying down the road at 20mph with one hand on your handle bars. Plus you can lick off all the peanut butter and honey goodness that may have dripped out of your sandwich.
Anyway, I am going to experiment with other easy-to-eat solutions. If anyone has any suggestions, I am all ears.
Now, here’s the really interesting thing… I rode my bike for 20miles, and had a pretty great ride. It was all flat, and I wasn’t actually trying to go all out, pretty much stayed in zone 3, and ended up blasting out an 18.8mph average on my single-speed. That’s absolutely a personal best considering I stayed in zone 3 it’s awesome… at one point I was spinning at an insane cadence and I topped 29mph… yowza at 42/18 with a 61″ roll-out… wubba… must have been the peanut butter!
Then I do a 6.3 mile run… again, I wasn’t trying for anything spectacular, in fact I thought I’d take it pretty easy, but as I ran down from my house to the trail, I checked my Forerunner, and I had run my first quarter mile at a 6:42 pace… I tried to slow a little bit, but ended up throwing down a 7:00 first mile, 7:11 second, and 7:04 third… I took what felt like an incredibly slow “jog break” at the half way point at an 8:10 pace, and ended up finishing my 6.3 miles at a 7:18 average pace. Where the hell did this run come from?
Maybe I have my training nutrition strategy completely wrong? Maybe I should look at eating more (at all) on my rides… But I have to be honest, this would be a hard habit to change… I have a really hard time believing that I should eat during a 90 minute or 2 hour training ride or run… I mean it just doesn’t seem right.
Well, either way it was a great day!
January 30th, 2007
Week 4 Down… This week was definitely random, but I got in some solid base work on all three disciplines. I fell off my process goals for strength training and swimming ever so slightly, but I’m not going to let that distract me. I am going refocus my efforts for next week as I continue to find a workable model for family, work, training, blogging, and play. I definitely want to make a goal for next week to find some more structure; but looking ahead to the schedule I can already tell that’s going to be hard.
As for training goals: I am continuing to progress on integrating strength training into my regular routine. I didn’t do a formal strength training every day this week. Friday I helped move and setup my new strength training system, so I moved weights around, but I didn’t actually do a formal workout. Saturday, I did a real long/hard 51 mile ride with 2000+ft of ascent on my fixie bike, so I’ll call that a leg strength training session, although again, it wasn’t really a formal weights session. I let my flexibility slide a little this week as well. And as a final blow to being process oriented, I only swam twice this week. But, as I said, I’m not going to let this get me off track, I had a solid week of training, and I am happy with my progress.
Detailed breakdown follows…
Strength Training - 1.59 hours - As I described early, I actually did 5 structured workouts this week, but had some element of serious resistance work each of the 7 days. I skipped my Iron Yoga this week, I’ll get back to that again next week. The big news for the week was the new addition of a “home gym” in my garage, which I plan to use for all my strength training sessions from now on. It was convenient today as I was able to slam out a quick arms/back workout while my family was getting ready to go out for a family outing at the park. Without the weights in the garage this workout would have taken an extra hour of driving to the gym, parking, waiting for machines to be free, etc.
Swimming - 1.33 hours - I only swam twice this week, one long session 1 hour, and one short session 20mins, but I got a total of 2 miles of swimming in, so it wasn’t a total loss. I am definitely going to try to find a masters swim program to join for next week.
Flexibility - 1.35 hours - Eh… well, I did some flexibility every day. But it feels like I was cheating on this goal. Maybe that’s because I am getting more used to doing it and so I’m getting lazy and blowing past some stretches. I am really feeling like I’m making no progress with my hamstrings. I didn’t achieve my goal of doing my problem area stretches for 2 minutes each day. Need to work on this!!!
Running - 2.05 hours - 15.58 miles - Yeah! 3 sold runs…. one was even a hill workout. But again, things were random, I actually did back to back days of running on Wed and Thurs. I made Thur a shorter distance run, because it was a hill workout, and it was while I was waiting for my daughter to complete her music class, so I only had about 45 minutes, and I didn’t want to be late. My times were slower for that run (8:15/mile average) thanks to some insane hills, including two times up a short quarter mile long hill that maxes out at 18% grade, and another longer one (about half a mile) that clocks in at 25% grade! There are literally stairs going up half the sidewalk on that hill. In that last tenth mile I was only able to muster a 22min/mile pace.
Cycling - 6.1 hours - 101.83 miles - Good week for cycling, mainly because of the 51 miles I threw down yesterday. Ironically, it was shaping up to be a bad week of cycling thanks to my bike “being in the shop” for most of the week. I’m way ahead of my outdoor cycling miles from last year (216.9 vs. 76.1), and I’m closing in on my total miles from last year(318.69 vs. 339.43).
Total Exercise Hours (including Strength and Flexibility Training): 12.4 hours
Total Swim/Bike/Run Hours: 9.48
More charts? Here you go…
January 28th, 2007
So yesterday I didn’t really get much done during the day. I took the kids to school in the morning, then came home to wait for my buddy Tyler to come by. See, Tyler has been telling me for about a year now that he would “loan me” his weight set. I’ve been telling Tyler, that anytime he wants to bring his weight set by, I’d be willing to let him store it in my garage for absolutely no charge, so long as he sets it up and I get to use it whenever I want… after all it’s in my garage, right?
Well, finally Tyler was ready to act on this idea… so around 9:30, I get the call, that he’s “on his way over”…. he just has to pick up his Dad’s truck, and then he’ll be right there. “What time are you really going to be over here? 4pm?” I ask… “I’ll see you in an hour, Dude! Oh yeah, why don’t I just pick you up on the way from my Dad’s and then you can help me load the truck up and it will take less time.”…. hmmm, I seem to remember the deal being he’d bring it over, I’d store it, now suddenly, I’m helping him load it up too… I suspect there’s more to the story. “Ok, if it speeds things up.”
Tyler did get to my house around 10:30, so he was on time so far… things were looking up. But on the drive over to his house he kept saying something about hoping he had all the parts, and being “pretty sure” he had organized things in his basement and had the bolts stored up on the window sill. Now, mind you, my garage had been filled with boxes for the last couple months because we had moved a bunch of junk out of a storage locker recently, and so I had spent the last week in preparation for this moving things out of my garage. Some stuff I had to throw away, some stuff I sold on Craig’s list, and some stuff I moved around to other parts of my house. The point is, I had prepared for this. (Notice how I am foreshadowing what I am about to discover in Tyler’s basement.)
The reason Tyler wanted to do me this favor, or I was doing him this favor, was that Tyler is remodeling his house, and it’s time for them to get cracking on finishing up the basement, which means they need to clean out the stuff they’ve been storing there. The fact is that they never use their basement at all… except to “store stuff”… and when I say “store” I mean throw in a giant unorganized pile on the floor. Isn’t that what you mean when you say store?
So when I arrive at Tyler’s basement, I discover that this weight set/machine is basically in a pile of partially assembled partially disassembled parts on the floor covered up with other random junk. Here are some things I remember moving out of the way to get to the weight set: a mountain bike, a broken floor fan, an old gym bag, some boxes of half used cans of house paint, a broken plastic kids tricycle, a laundry basket with god knows what in it.
Then we got down to the weights… and remember when Tyler said he had “organized” things. Apparently “organized” means something different where he went to school. Unless maybe things were sorted in piles of the ratio of their weight in troy ounces to their diameter in hands to their height in parsecs. Basically it was a giant pile that had no rhyme or reason to it. It took us till 12:30pm to sort through all this junk and load up his truck.
After all this work (which by the way, I decided counts as a strength training session for the day, since I was carrying dumbbells and weight plates up a flight of stairs and into a truck bed) we decided to grab some lunch. We argued about fast food (got stick to a schedule) vs. good food (who wants to eat fast food) and we decided to hit a local hole in the wall diner call “The Dish” where Tyler insisted they served the worlds best Tuna Melt. I’m not sure where Tuna Melt lands on the fast food vs. non-fast food spectrum, but it was good and we were out of there pretty quickly.
When we got to my place, the chore of assembling this beast started. The only time constraint was that we had to be done by about 5pm so I could take the kids to a birthday party for one of their friends. It turns out we needed almost all of this time. But when it was all said and done, we got the machine assembled without too much cursing, and no injuries.
Actually, after the big pieces were in place, I left Tyler to finish the details while I worked on putting my handler bars on my bike.
When it was all said and done, we got the system setup and conveniently positioned in my two car garage so that my wife can still park her car in her stall, and I can workout, or set up my cycle trainer to get a quick indoor cycle ride in. The new machine is more than enough for me, and provides a good solution for 3 workouts that I was dependent on a gym to complete before, and another 3 workouts that I had to use a sub-optimal substitute for. It also adds a ton of versatility for when I want to mix up my strength training routine in the next couple months.
For now I plan to use the following features:
The following Cable exercises I would emulate with dumbbell substitutes, now I can do the real thing at home:
- Tricep Pull Down with rope attachment
- Wide Arm Lat Pull down
- Seated Row
I used to have other sub-optimal replacements for the following:
- I would do a dumbbell squat before when I worked out at home, but now I have a real squat “cage” and a good bar and weight set to do full body squats.
- I used to have to emulate dips by doing bench dips, but now I have a true dip bar setup to do dips.
- And finally I now have a true bicep isolation pad to do legitimate “Preacher Curls”.
I even have a weighted belt to add additional weight to my dips if I graduate to that level… 
I already had dumbbells and a bench, but with the new setup I have additional dumbbell weights and a bench that I can setup in a flat, incline, or decline position. So I can add some variety to my workouts. The machine also includes a fly setup, so I can change my chest fly to a seated version instead of the dumbbell version I’ve been doing.
Here are some other shots of the setup:
Oh yeah, as long as your checking out my workout center, here are some more pictures…
To prove I love bikes, here are some bikes hanging from the ceiling, and my spinning trainer neatly stored on a wall hook:
Here is the TV/DVD for inspiration while working out, notice the close up, I watch the Spinning Videos, my wife watches spy thrillers.
January 27th, 2007
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