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More on the Giro and Doping

5/31/2016

Everybody loves a comeback story. We love to see people pull themselves out of the depths of suffering, win the mind over matter battle and rise like the Phoenix to new heights. It’s what heroes are made of, right?

With the Giro d’Italia now concluded, it’s important to take a quick look back at how the final stages after the third rest day played out. Maybe you jumped out of your seat shouting as Vincenzo Nibali rose from the ashes and in the span of two days overcame what appeared to be an insurmountable lead to win the 3-week Grand Tour. Nearly 5 minutes behind then leader Steven Kruijswijk, Nibali carved time into his rivals like a samurai sword through butter, ultimately taking the victory by 52 seconds over Esteban Chavez of Orica-GreenEdge and 1:17 over Alejandro Valverde in third.

Or, maybe your take on Nibali’s incredible resurgence was like mine – “This is complete bullshit.”

I’ve been at this long enough that the telltale signs of something being amiss come into focus fairly quickly. And, in this day and age of incredible, inhuman performances in any endurance sport, we as viewers have every right to call foul when a performance no longer appears plausible. Indeed, we have few choices – we can believe; we can doubt; or we can ignore. But, choose we must.

Nibali credits a come to Jesus motivational pep talk with teammate Michele Scarponi as the talisman of his overnight resurgence to Grand Tour hero.

What was the secret behind Vincenzo Nibali’s amazing comeback at the 2016 Giro, a fightback that saw him claw his way from 4:43 down on the leader of the race with devastating attacks on his rivals over the final two mountain stages? A pep talk from Michele Scarponi, apparently. While there is no denying Nibali’s talent, panache for attacking in any race at any time, nor his versatility as a rider in order to win each of the three distinctly different Grand Tours, to not question his resurrection – over the course of a matter of hours – is, quite frankly, insane.

Don’t forget that only four days before standing atop the final podium, the Astana doctors drew blood in an attempt to see if Nibali was even healthy enough to continue on. This was a man beaten both physically and mentally. This was not a case of a single bad day, which any Grand Tour champion can have. Nibali was out of sorts and clearly not on par with the other favorites. Despite his bad luck in the uphill time trial, he was losing time one challenging stage to the next. Stick a fork in Nibali; he was d-o-n-e.

Don’t forget Floyd Landis and his Tour de France victory in 2006. After losing a truckload of time, he, too, rose like the Phoenix and stomped his way to victory in that year’s Queen stage and subsequent closing time trial. Back then, commentators would spouting colorful adjectives like “incredible”, “unbelieveable”, “monstrous”, and the like. Today, these words seem struck from their vocabulary. Why is that? Because 10 years ago, our heads were in the sand thanks to Lance Armstrong and his never failing a drug test (but was anyone more doped to the gills?). We wanted 2006 to be the Tour of Renewal, Part II. But, now, a decade later, our heads are no longer in the sand. Rather than touting Nibali’s performance as “incredible”, anyone with a lick of common sense just shakes his or her head.

And the riders themselves are no help. I will say that my gut tells me there is a higher percentage of clean riders in the peloton today than even a handful of years ago. But, do not extrapolate that out to my thinking the majority of riders are clean. No chance in Hell. The riders fail the cycling public – and themselves – by not raising their pitchforks and torches against cheating. Are we to believe that old dopers now in charge of teams or in positions of influence are suddenly clean? Have suddenly forgotten their black market networks for sourcing PEDs? C’mon … Yet, we are to believe that these ex-dopers are now running clean teams. Right.

Even Jonathan Vaughters, admitted doper and sycophant of running a clean team did an about face when he stated he would fold what is now the Cannondale Pro Cycling Team if anyone on the team ever tested positive. Well, guess what happened? And guess what his response was? He recalled his statement and backpedaled from it faster than an arachnophobe jumps away from a spider, stating it would be worse to pack it in that continue the great work he’s done. Wrong. Honor your word. Fold the team. Start a new one and purge any vestige of past and current cheaters from the ranks. THAT’S what you do. That’s how you embrace your morals. That’s how you make a game-changing statement that strikes the very foundation of the corruption.

And, let’s make no mistake. Doping is endemic to EVERY endurance sport. Do you really believe that running or triathlon or soccer or tennis or … or … or … is any cleaner? If you do, then my condolences. I hear they’re making “Walter Mitty II”; you should try out for the lead.

Happy Training,
Coach Nate

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Memorial Day - Personal Perspective

5/30/2016

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The Weight of Air

5/29/2016

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Sit down, relax. Close your eyes. Take a slow, deep breath in through the nose. Hold it for a long moment as you let the chest and shoulders relax and sink down. Allow yourself to feel heavy in your chair. Now, slowly exhale that air through your mouth. Repeat this another handful of times before opening your eyes and reading on.

A little more relaxed now? You gotta love air. That blend of mostly nitrogen, some oxygen, with a sprinkling of argon, water vapor and carbon dioxide for good measure. It is this mixture of gases which provides the perfect environment for all kinds of animal and plant life to flourish. The more we exercise and the harder we attempt to move, the more precious this commodity becomes to us. Luckily, air is ever-present and we can tap into it whenever the mood to inhale strikes us. It is virtually impossible to avoid air.

However, while we take air for granted, it's actually quite fascinating stuff. For example, you might assume that it's virtually weightless and just "floats around", free of the influence of gravity. But that's far from the truth because it turns out that air is actually quite heavy. 

If you had a cardboard box that was 3 feet on a side (height, width, depth), so a perfect cube, and you placed it at sea level with a temperature of 60 degrees F, how much do you think the air inside the box would weigh? The mass of air in the box would weigh about 2.5 pounds! Sounds crazy, I know. Since the pressure of air pushes equally in all directions, you're not aware of its weight or how much it presses against you every second of every day. It’s not even really noticeable when moving casually, such as when walking down the street or even hiking on a trail. But, start moving through it at an accelerated rate of speed, and the mass of air begins to be felt and to matter - a lot.

Nowhere is the impact of air resistance more palatable than while riding a bike – because this is the fastest form of human-powered locomotion in the world of Sport. Taking your “average-sized cyclist”, for every 10 feet ridden on the bike, the typical cyclist has to push 1.5 cubic yards of air weighing about 3 pounds out of the way. During an hour's ride averaging 18mph, a cyclist will need to push aside more than 20,000 cubic yards of air, weighing more than 40,000 pounds. That’s every hour!

In the light of the above, you can see why the largest component of power needed when cycling is to overcome drag force while moving through air. In a nutshell, the power needed to maintain a given speed on the bike is highly influenced by the rider’s velocity, but also of importance is how slippery the rider is when looking at the combined cross-sectional area of the cyclist and bike, and the drag coefficient (how aerodynamic or not that rider is). Since we cannot change the density of air, the only thing cyclists can do to make it easier to ride is improve the frontal profile they present to the wind. On a road bike, some adjustments are very simple – avoid loose-fitting clothing; keep the elbows in rather than flared out; ride lower rather than propped up; use slightly narrower handlebars that do not extend beyond shoulder width; if you’re flexible enough, increase the drop from your saddle height to your handlebar height by 1-2 centimeters. Just to name a few.

Tom Boonen of the Etixx-Quick Step professional cycling team, conducted some tests on an indoor velodrome a couple years back. He was very much a traditionalist, for example, always using box rim wheels for the Cobbled Classics – the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix and the other tune-up races. On the velodrome, he held a consistent wattage per lap as he made adjustments to his riding style. He changed things like his handlebar width, riding position and changing out the box rims for 50mm carbon wheels. The improvements in speed were staggering. With bars that were just 2cm narrower and changing to carbon racing wheels, he was able to push out 20-25w more at the same HR and effort. When he switched back to his old set-up, he cratered fairly quickly at the higher wattage. He was sold.

As athletes, we get so focused on training harder in order to improve that we overlook something that is quite literally right in front of us every day. Certainly, we have to train harder and smarter in order to improve. But, unless we optimize our riding position and equipment choices, it is also clear that a great deal of our improved fitness can simply be squandered away as we fight the ever-present friction and weight of the air around us.

Happy Training,
Coach Nate

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Doping Is Still Prevalent in Cycling

5/25/2016

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The Biggest Mistake Masters Athletes Make in Training

5/19/2016

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As we get older, Masters athletes want to hold on to their youth. To a certain degree, this is done illicitly with PEDs (performance enhancing drugs). But, I’ll bite my tongue and digress, because this post is not about PEDs. Largely, Masters athletes make the mistake of training as if they were still in their 20s. While we can certainly perform, say, an interval workout in our 40s like we did back in our 20s, what we cannot do is naturally recover from that workout in the same manner. Certain physiological capacities erode over time, no matter how hard we combat that erosion. So, what is the Masters athlete to do?

Typically, when younger, athletes can train “hard” almost every day. As an age group swimmer and even during my collegiate swimming career, turning laps in the pool took on a sado-masochistic nature day in, day out. No way could I do that today, in my late-40s. As a professional triathlete, I typically had 2 block interval days during the week – Mondays and Thursdays, and sometimes pushed my shorter long workouts on the weekends. Again, no way could I do that today. Recovery came quickly, in part due to my youth, in part due to the fact that I was only focused on training and racing, and in part because I used solid recovery practices between workouts and day-to-day in the forms of post-workout nutrition, massage, chiropractic sessions, acupuncture and kicking my feet up on the couch. As a father of two teens and a full-time working stiff, the luxury of time is not something I own anymore.

The time-crunched athlete panics and feels that to make up for the lack of time spent training, he needs to push all of his workouts harder. The premise is that due to the lack of volume, workout intensity needs to rise in order to compensate. For awhile, this might work. Long-term, this is not a strategy for success but rather for failure; or, at the very least, under-performance.

Studies show that standing still to recover between intensive track intervals is every bit as effective as jogging super easy. So, why do we jog easy? Because we’re working out, man! We can’t stand still! Standing still is lazy. But, the insight the studies provide is great – we need to dial back our recovery workouts and recovery intervals, and make them feel ridiculously easy. What do I mean by this? Instead of shooting for a HR in the low-120s as is typically prescribed, shoot for a HR in the 110-115 range. Rather than thinking of a recovery session as a “workout”, instead think of it as a change to lick your wounds, relax and simply enjoy moving. This is a rather big shift in mentality, but a necessary one. If you draw a line across a sheet of paper, recovery workouts need to be a deep trough.

Next, Masters athletes should limit themselves to one intensive day per week. If you are a single sport athlete, then that’s one workout per week. If you’re a multi-sport athlete, then you could do up to 2 sports that day and make both workouts challenging; but the caution would be to spread those workouts out as much as you can. Do one in the morning and the other in the evening, if possible.

The weekends are typically saved for the long workouts since the majority of us do not work. The key to the long workout is to complete it as the proper intensity – or, lack thereof. Most athletes want to test their mettle in long workouts, really put the bit on the mouth and crack the whip. After all, if we can bludgeon ourselves in the long workout, we create a heck of a lot of training stress and, thus, post-workout adaptation. Sounds good as a hypothesis, but hits a brick wall when put into practice. The purpose of the long workout is to create certain physiological adaptations that only the long workout can produce, such as metabolizing fat as a fuel source as we dip further into our muscle glycogen stores over time. But, the best way for this to occur is to hold back on the effort. Long workouts should be fatiguing due to their duration first and due to your effort second. Most athletes approach this in the opposite manner. As a rule of thumb, your effort should be L1/L2, with the majority of the workout done in the L2 range. This is clearly the “go long”, aerobic zone. In SOME long workouts, it is OK to press into L3 for some structured work mid-workout or late-workout, but this should be done sparingly within the workout as well as how often you inject this slightly higher workload.

As a Masters athlete, the rest of your workouts should be steady L2 work. So, as you draw that line across the paper, there is one trough, one spike and the rest of the line is right in the middle. The steady L2 work cannot be overdone nor can it be given too much importance. The interval work makes you faster; the L2 work allows you to be faster in the latter stages of a race and minimizes the negative impact of any match you burn during the race. If you forego the L2 work and instead complete more interval days, you will accomplish 2 things: 1) you will lower the value of the hard days because you will be carrying more fatigue into them and, thus, perform worse than you otherwise could; and 2) drag out the time it takes for you to recover from your intense days which will negatively impact your ability to perform on your L2 days as well as in your long workouts. Or, you will have to sacrifice an L2 day for another recovery day. Smart to do, but it’s a sacrifice of what is arguably the most valuable type of training day for the Masters athlete.

Some of you reading this will think I’m crazy or that I don’t challenge myself or those athletes with whom I work nearly enough. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. I’ve learned over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes the hard way, sometimes by design, and this is what works most effectively for the Masters athletes with whom I work. Think of it this way: You’re a Porsche. You want to burn rubber off the line and hum along rather effortlessly at a fast clip. If you try to accomplish this through increased interval work, it’s like putting a lawnmower engine into that Porsche. The deliberate, consistent L2 work is what fine-tunes the engine, cleans out the valves and pistons, and allows you to flip the switch on the turbo boost when it comes time to.
When you push too hard too often, or skimp on the recovery workouts (or complete days off), or do not exercise discipline during your long workouts, you are effectively reducing the peaks and valleys of that line you just drew across the piece of paper, and creating much more of a flattened line. What happens when something flat lines?

If you typically feel muscle fatigue when warming up for your key workouts, you’re training too hard and not recovering enough. Give this approach a try. I’ll bet you feel better day to day, perform better in your key workouts and will ultimately race better, too.

Happy Training,
Coach Nate

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Creating Sustainable Progress in Training

5/14/2016

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The quick video primer to this post can be found here.

Whether you are self-coached or working with a coach, tell me if this scenario sounds familiar. You’ve been training religiously for a period of time and results came both quick and early. But, now you’ve plateaued or maybe you’ve regressed a little bit. You’re starting to feel more fatigued more often, yet you continue to follow your plan religiously. After all, no pain, no gain, right?

There’s a famous Greek tale about a man named Milo who developed hero-like strength by lifting a young calf while he was a young boy. As he matured and as the calf grew into a bull, Milo continued to lift it every day to the point he could lift the half-ton bull over his head. While this is clearly a myth, what it does do is speak to the principle of overload – in order to progress, we need to create overload so that we force the body to adapt to stimulus. Create too little stimulus and either progress is stunted or it doesn’t occur at all. It is important to progressively increase the training load – either by intensity or by volume, rarely by both – in order to experience continued gains.

There are various periods of adaptation that athletes and coaches either don’t comprehend or tend to ignore. The first period occurs immediately after stress is introduced. In the day(s) immediately after a hard workout, the body has to respond to that stress and repair itself. Performance is typically impaired and the athlete experiences things like deep muscular fatigue, elevated resting HR and either elevated or depressed HR in subsequent training. Even if you feel great the following day and like you could do yet another hard workout, this does not mean that you should. Masters athletes especially need to use caution when adding more hard work to their weekly training routine. The body needs rest and recovery after stressful bouts of training.

The next stage is that of adaptation. Adaptation occurs when manageable stress is introduced and recovery is not thusly impaired. If you train too hard, you dig too deep a hole to climb out of and a standard amount of recovery isn’t enough to set you up for another bout of stress. Yet, athletes often hold firm to their one recovery day or a couple easy days regardless of what their body is telling them. Severity of training sessions must be kept in check; we must finish tough workouts feeling like we could do another repeat or two were it required. Recovery is when the adaptation occurs, when the body can sufficiently repair the damage done and make you bigger, faster, stronger. Adaptation does not occur during the hard work itself, which is one of the most misunderstood things by athletes who feel the progress comes from the stress not from the recovery.

Eventually, athletes do reach plateaus. When you reach a plateau in your training or racing performances (and assuming you have been training intelligently), rather than stressing out, you should be excited. Plateaus are periods of time without progress. Typically plateaus occur because the body is absorbing stress rather than processing it. Think of a coiling spring before it releases. Typically, progress after a plateau results in a big step forward rather than a small incremental one. The biggest error both athletes and coaches make when hitting a plateau is that they start to trainer harder or faster or longer, thinking the plateau is evidence of not doing enough. In fact, this approach increases the stressors, which only serves to promote worse and worse performance. When this position is taken, the only path forward is one of failure.

Failure occurs when the body can no longer cope with the stress it’s being subjected to; it can no longer respond to and adapt to the stress. Performance degrades and athletes become sick, injured, can’t sleep well, become edgy and generally a basket case to be around. Insufficient rest and severe training are the culprits, because training and recovery are not being prescribed intelligently – either by the self-coached athlete or an athlete’s coach. With the Masters athletes I work with who have worked with coaches in the past, I find the majority of them are overtrained, heavily fatigued and really just not enjoying training or racing anymore. They are in too big of a deficit and at wits end. A well-thought out training program will ensure that this stage is never reached because sufficient rest and recovery is built into both the short-term and long-term plan.

Just as it is important to create enough stress that prompts the body to react and adapt to it, it is also critical to include enough easy training and days off so the body can actually recover from the stress and get stronger. If you balance stress with recovery, you will be able to avoid the pitfalls of ending up burned out, injured or sick.

Happy Training,
Coach Nate

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Key Weekend Workouts for the Olympic Distance

5/8/2016

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I recently posted a blog on key weekend workouts for 70.3 and 140.6 racing. I figured it would make sense to do the same for Olympic Distance races as well. You can take a quick look at the 2min primer for this post at the OTS YouTube Channel.

Race Simulation Ride
Warm up for 20-30min, relaxed L1/L2, working your way to stretches of road with minimal interruptions, such as stop signs, stop lights, etc.

Go through the following 2-3 times:

20min SST, finding a realistic mix of HR, watts and perceived effort
10min relaxed L1 pedaling; eat some food, replenish some fluids, quick bio break

Cool down as you ride back home
BONUS: Slip your racing flats on and complete an easy, relaxed 10-20min jog, just to practice the transition from bike to run

Negative Split Long Run – up to 90min
Warm up for 15min, relaxed L1/L2

Settle in at steady L2 until you have about 30min left to run. Then complete 3 x (7min L3 with 3min relaxed L1).

Cool down 10min, relaxed L1
BONUS: Ride 45min easy L1 right before this run

Bike/Run Double Brick
Bike: 60-90min, steady L2 effort
Run: 30min, steady L2 effort
Bike: 45-60min, steady L2 but lift effort to L3/SST for the final 20min
Run: 20-25min, start at L5 for the first minute, then settle into L4 for 4min and into L3 for another
10min cool down the rest of the time.

Bike Focus Weekend
Saturday:

Swim first thing in the morning, 60-90min session; keep it aerobic
Bike right after swimming, 3 hours at steady L2 effort

Sunday:

Bike 3 hours at steady L1/L2 effort
BONUS: Run 10-15min off the bike, relaxed L1

Run Focus Weekend
Saturday:

Swim first thing in the morning, 60-90min session; keep it aerobic
Run right after swimming, 80-90min steady L2 effort

Sunday:

Bike 60min easy, relaxed L1

Run 60min off the bike, steady strong L2; elevate to L3 for 10min before cooling down

Especially for Masters athletes, it’s important to mix things up and avoid falling into a rut of doing the same thing weekend after weekend. Keep the body stimulated and guessing at what you’re going to throw at it next. At the very least, alternate weekends where one weekend you do the standard “Saturday long ride, Sunday long run” approach, and the next weekend you choose one of the workouts above. There’s no right or wrong way to go about it, but the variety will challenge you, keep you mentally fresher and better stimulate the body to be prepared for the rigors of long racing.

Give these a try and let me know what you think.

Happy Training,
Coach Nate

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Endurance Athletes Train Too Hard

5/1/2016

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Before heading into this blog post, you can get a quick 2-minute primer on the ORION Training Systems YouTube channel.

Endurance athletes, especially Masters athletes, train too hard. I’ll define “endurance” as any event lasting an hour or more. So, this encompasses a broad range of athletes, from cyclists to half-marathoners and marathoners, to every triathlete on this planet (not to mention all the other endurance sports out there, like cross-country skiing). We have been done a disservice on multiple fronts, not the least of which is by the vast majority of coaches out there who espouse repeated bouts of interval training per week or prescribe a large volume of interval training on their athletes’ hard days. The premise is that we get faster by training harder. This is true – to a very finite point. In order to better understand how we can extract more from our training and how to best balance aerobic with anaerobic efforts, it’s first important to understand how the body works.

At a high-level, there are 3 energy systems from which the body draws during any exercise of any duration and any intensity – phosphate, lactate and aerobic. Phosphate is mainly leveraged in all out efforts lasting up to 30sec but typically falling in the 3-10sec range. Lactate gets produced in greater quantities the closer we get to our LT (Lactate Threshold) and when we exercise above it. Lactate is a fuel source, a byproduct of our effort that our body processes more quickly than it is produced until such time as we hit and cross our LT. The aerobic energy system is when carbohydrate burning is slowed (but not stopped) and we recruit some stored fat as fuel because we are training or racing at an effort that is well below our LT.

Even 5k runners use predominantly the aerobic energy system -- as high as 93%. We really don’t elicit a high anaerobic utilization until we dip below 2min in effort, and leveraging a higher percentage of lactate for fuel instead of aerobic energy does not even occur until a 400m all out effort – something that lasts well under a minute. O2 is the fuel of muscles, and it takes about 30sec for the O2 we breathe in to be put to use. People think the O2 is used immediately because when they hold their breath for a long time and the lungs start burning, they take another breath and feel instant relief. But that relief actually comes from expelling CO2, not inhaling O2. A build-up of CO2 -- because we can't inhale enough O2 to replace it -- is what becomes the limiter with higher intensity performance. When CO2 production outpaces our ability to intake fresh O2, there’s a cascading effect with higher lactate production and other internal triggers that tip us further into an anaerobic state.

So, on the one hand, it is imperative we become aerobically efficient. We do this by tuning our aerobic system so we have a turbo engine rather than a lawnmower engine. By focusing on fat utilization, aerobic training, we can push out metabolic triggers that start tipping us toward anaerobic system/fuel utilization (lactate, phosphate). When these triggers are ultimately pulled, carb utilization speeds up and we burn through muscle glycogen faster. Hence, the more aerobically efficient we are, the longer our muscle glycogen lasts. Also, the less our muscles fatigue, the longer our muscle neurons fire properly and spare us from potential cramping (IMHO, cramping isn't dehydration or salt loss; it stems from fatigue that keeps the muscles from firing properly).

Here's the rub. Part of our ability to become more aerobically efficient (more O2 to the working muscles) gets stimulated by bouts of high intensity training, especially VO2max efforts (lasting up to a handful of minutes). Higher intensity training forces the body to create more plasma and red blood cells, which in turn saturates the blood with a higher amount of O2. Think of a VO2max training block when the first workout of 3min intervals leaves you heaving and out of sorts. After a few weeks, the 4-5min intervals are hard and very taxing, yet there is also a sense that the body is settling in to them. This is due to the adaptation I just mentioned.

The key is to stimulate thru high intensity enough, but not too much. Too much high intensity disrupts your ability to make that internal metabolic shift to being more aerobically efficient. Bike racers can dig deep and throw down attack after attack at the end of a 5+ hour race not because they do a lot of anaerobic training but rather because they are so aerobically efficient that when it's "go time", they have the muscle glycogen reserves to support those efforts and their muscle neurons are not too fatigued so cramping typically isn't an issue either. Next time you watch a bike race or mountain stage of the Tour, instead of focusing on the strongest rider, instead focus on those in the front group who inevitably start to fall away. Watch the change in their body language as steam and smoke start to inevitably pour out from under their hoods like a car overheating on the side of a desert road.

The aerobic focus -- and strict adherence to the parameters of those workouts (L2 watts, HR maxed at 70-78%) is what allows you to compete in a multi-hour race at a very consistent effort and pace.  That's aerobic efficiency. It is the complement of the high intensity work -- a little but not too much -- which allows your finish time to be considerably faster than they would otherwise be. The body is a potpourri of response to stimuli. This training stuff would be so much simpler if it weren't, if instead it was more the case of pulling one lever or another to elicit the precise response we want. But, then, I'd be out of a coaching job.  :-)

So, when you think about your own training or the training program your coach has you doing, what percentage of time is spent doing intervals at SST or greater intensity? If it is consistently more than 10% per week, it’s too much. When we look at our lactate production curve, the biggest limiter to performance is how fast we can go before the curve starts to steepen up and to the right – meaning, when lactate production starts trending toward a greater amount being produced than can be processed causing the body to pretty quickly shut down. The longer the “tail” of our lactate curve, the more aerobically efficient we become and, thus, the faster we also become.

Happy Training,
Coach Nate

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