Over the hump

Sort of an odd title -- Over the Hump --- but fitting. It seems that with any training program, the toughest part is the beginning, when you feel clunky and heavy. If there is some past memory of being fit, your brain seems to enjoy reminding you about it. From the dark, pessimistic corners, a stream of thinking goes like this: "Remember when you were fit? Wow, those were the days. Now look at you. Look at how slow you're going! Look at how you plod along! Remember how nimble and light you were? Now you're older, your fat and your slow. It will take years to get a taste of that again."

Although I wouldn't call myself fast by any means, the clunkiness is gone, and I am back in the groove of training. It feels so good to be back in this state that, as I mentioned to coach Walton, I've become nervous on the days he has slotted as off days. There's a fear (no doubt issued from the same region of the brain) that a day without training will vault me back to where I was a couple of months ago.

This is the trick, of course. Once you get over this hump, training becomes more of an affirmation of possibilities than an affirmation of being out of shape. It's a profound difference. Before, you rely heavily on every trick in the book to ignore negative thoughts and commit to a workout. After, you have to hold yourself back.

This week is a 12-hour training week. This will be about twice the number of training hours Brian started me off with. My weight is down to 195. That's a seven pound drop from early January, and going back to October, I've now lost about 20 pounds. As Brian suggested, when the weight starts burning off, my back problems would fade. And that's exactly what's happened.

21 days since testing

It was a little more than three weeks ago I reported to Cadence for testing. Since then Coach Brian Walton has been sending me detailed workouts plans, and my nutritionist, Rebecca Marks Rudy, of Trismarter.com, has been watching over my diet.

As I've mentioned before, accountability works magic when a schedule becomes inflamed with responsibilities. Work has been crazy. But I've hit all my workouts and have been following Rebecca's recommendations quite religiously. Although I did have a few more beers yesterday than my allotted one, Rebecca said that on occasion, in conjunction with heavier training days, it was OK to do something like enjoy the Super Bowl.

It's amazing what can happen in three weeks time. Something clicked over about 10 days ago and I could feel that I'd lost weight. Yesterday, in fact, I weighed in at 197. I'm soon due for a bike test on the Computrainer using a CycleOps Power Tap, but I can tell you right now that I'm feeling more power and fluidity on the bike. On the run my pace at 145 beats per minute has noticeably dropped.

It's funny; I had been out of shape for about two years. There's a despair that sinks in. You start to believe you're ten thousand miles away from feeling like an athlete again. Yet in truth, it's really not that far away. Certainly I'm a long ways off from attaining a level like was, but the feeling alone of being cattle-prodded back into a good training discipline is enough of a buzz in itself. There are 10 weeks of training until I return to Cadence for my followup testing. It's marked on the calendar, believe me. Like Dave Scott often says, a key to good training is to make a game of it.

Another note about working with Rebecca. She understands how life can be, and in talking with her about how to redirect my diet, she didn't load me up with dozens of recipe books. She talked me through how I can set things up so if I get home after a long day of work, training, commuting and errands, I don't have to spend an hour trying to cook something. In other works, I have become a big fan of Lean Cuisine and other relatively healthy frozen dinners. That and a salad and I'm good to go.

That and one light beer. Except on Super Bowl Sunday.

Rebuilding an engine

Last week I posted a feature on Triathletemag.com describing my experience being tested at Cadence Cycling and Multisport in New York. http://www.triathletemag.com/Departments/Features/2007_Features/Report_from_Boot_Camp.htm

I mention in the article I came home with a packet of detailed information. I also spent time last weekend talking with Rebecca Marks Rudy, a nutritionist with Trismarter.com. I presented Rebecca a multi-day food log. We talked for a while about sports nutrition in general, and she took an initial look at my food log. She asked detailed questions about exactly what foods I ate, when, and how much. I also had a fresh set of numbers from Cadence---in one of the tests, Chad Butts, the Cadence exercise physiologist, hooked me up to a device that ran an electric current through me and generated a report about what's going on with the 202.4 pounds I currently way. It was not easy information to swallow, but it's always good to know exactly where you stand when you start the new year and embark on a training mission. Rebecca took the numbers and my food log and spent time this week crunching detailed numbers.

The Cadence body composition report went like this:

Age: 44
Weight: 202.4
Height: 72 inches
Body fat %: 28.0 (!)
Weight actual fat: 56 pounds (!!!)

Boy, I knew I was in rough shape, but the image of hauling around 56 pounds of fat every step I run is--no pun intended--depressing. But the great thing about getting the picture of truth is that you have something to measure progress by. I recall years ago hearing about a study that showed how keeping a detailed log and charting objective, specific data clearly was an advantage as compared to those who didn't keep track of objective information. It seemed like the charted progress, incremental though it may have been, gave test subjects a feeling of satisfaction. And ultimately momentum.

I came back from New York last Sunday night. I've had a good week of training and am looking to do the same this weekend. Bring on the momentum

Cadence Boot Camp

You'll notice in the photos above two guys in lab coats appear to be wondering what the hell is wrong with me. Indeed, the current state of my swimming tends to raise some eyebrows. Fortunately for me, they know what they're doing, and it didn't take long for Cadence coaches Holden Comeau and Brian Walton to gain insight into the seeming anchor attached to my swim stroke.

It's early in the new year, and what better time to blow the cobwebs out than two days of high-end, exercise physiology testing. I'm reporting from the Cadence Cycling and Multisport Center in NYC. As you may have already heard, this is no ordinary bike shop. It's better described as a combination state-of-the-art in the following categories: exercise physiology testing on the bike, in the pool and on the run, a bike-fit lab and bike-fit protocol that probes all manner of depths and nuances. The place is decked out with various performance labs, an Endless Pool, a showroom where they sell equipment, and a cafe that I can't help but notice has become popular with even the non-athletic types living and working in Tribeca. As I type these words, it is in this cafe I sit, alongside a bottle of S. Pellegrino mineral water.

Yesterday, day one, Cadence coach Brian Walton and his staff set me up with a lactate threshold swimming test and LT test on the bike. Walton also took me outside on the bike (on a January day seeming more like early spring than deep winter. It was around 60 degrees).


Today, Chad Butts, a Cadence exercise physiologist and cycling coach, put me through a lacate threshold test on the treadmill, followed by a max VO2 test, also running. Talk about a one-two punch. After I recovered, Chad and Brian took me through one the bike fitting process used by Cadence, a two-hour plus program which unveiled areas worthy of focus I had never thought of before.

Soon the coaches will be talking me through my test results. I'll be posting a comprehensive article onto Triathletemag.com on Monday.

Close call

On December 10th I had did a presentation on behalf of Triathlete Magazine at the Life Time Fitness triathlon series summit. This took place in Chicago. So my wife and I took the opportunity to fly into Chicago a few days early and drive to Iowa, to see my folks. Usually December is a mild weather month in Iowa. The bad stuff happens in January and February. But both of our drives across Illinois and through eastern Iowa took place in snowstorms and icy conditions. The drive from Midway airport to Cedar Rapids was particularly tense: The final 90 miles seem to take hours, and we passed dozens of cars who had slid nose first into ditches. We made it through the trip and had a good time (otherwise). But the stress of driving through all that and, as pointed out by Coach Walton, the change of climate (65 degrees in San Diego; below 20 in Iowa) had me waking up with a sore throat when we got back to San Diego. It was the kind where I felt like I was on the tipping point of something that would last for a solid week. Coach Walton had me take a couple of days completely off and I went to bed early (with the help of the all-powerful NyQuil). By Thursday of last week I was fine and training well again.

"It took me the longest time to learn that," Brian said to me over the phone. He was talking about doling out rest days and the timing of re-entering training while in the face of an athlete falling prey to a virus. Walton says that the tough part is the overall timing of a training microcycle, with longer stuff on weekends and such, and trying to touch all the training bases. He says he's figured out how to do that as a coach. I asked him if he figured out during his cycling career how to do that as an athlete (Brian was a three-time Olympian for Canada--and silver medalist in 1996-- and rode on teams like 7-11, Motorola and Saturn). He laughed and said, "Never. I couldn't tell you how many times I ignored symptoms and got myself into trouble. Ignored it, ignored it, ignored it."

I used to do that to a lesser degree as a runner back in the 1990s. It was more about the 'ol injury fandango, as author/runner John L. Parker Jr. coined it. You'd finish a hard workout and will have noticed some tweak in the achilles tendon or hamstring, and you think, Should I lay off a day? Should I not? Just ice it? See a doctor? Sometimes I played it smart, other times I incurred injuries that lasted days or even weeks. Yet another good reason to have a coach do the worrying for you.

My training under Coach Walton started small and has steadily grown in terms of volume. Back in November, a six-hour training week was what we were working with. I see that during Christmas week I'll be churning through 11 hours. Which is great. I've never performed this kind of base work as a triathlete, preparing for a race months and months away.

Computrainer (late) 2007

Last week, I successfully hooked up a new Computrainer to an old Dell computer. Computrainers have been around a long time it seems. I have a memory of visiting Nick Radkewich, an American trying to make the Olympic team back before the 2000 games, and in the middle of his apartment he had a wicked Computrainer set up. It was the centerpiece of his home.

I played around with the software on the Computer. Just about every bike course worth mentioning can be simulated on the trainer, with computer game like graphics to give you the cerebral gist of where you are. But the real goods is in the data ticker. What a feast. After you calibrate the bike and start riding, the trainer simulates the hills and conditions of your ride, and then lets you know in hard numbers the following: speed, time, watts, cadence, heart rate, distance covered, and averages of several of these. There might be something else that I'm forgetting, but you get the idea. And there it is, on your monitor, delivered to you in real time, right below a little graphic simulation of yourself as you pedal around (for example) Seattle. When you hit a climb, the trainer tells you what the angle of the slope is as you feel the machine add resistance to your pedaling.

Three weeks in

In the first few weeks of training you, Coach Brian Walton seeks to accomplish several things: Get you into the rythem of training, keep you free of injury, and last but not least, get you hooked on it. "It's like a drug," Walton says. "I'm like a dealer who gives out the first few samples for free. Then once I've got you hooked, you're all mine."

Indeed, the training thus far has been manageable if not easy. This past week I logged 7.5 hours of training, most of it relaxed and aerobic. Of course, I say easy because lodged in my brain are the hard training weeks I was able to accomplish (a long time ago) when I was actually fit and deep in preparations for a race. My experience in the three weeks of being coached has been like having my bell rung: Why the hell didn't I get a coach a long time ago? I know what I would have done if I'd been left to my old devices and started this up self-coached. I would have clicked off a four hour ride, thrashed myself with a junky 2 hour run, and generally flailed away like that with sporadic bursts of overtraining until I hurt myself.

Duh.

And then I would have stopped training altogether and a year would have flown by.