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.

Cobwebs

I'm nearly two weeks into my training, under the guidance of Cadence coach Brian Walton, and it's immensely gratifying to feel the stiffness, in my lower back and knees, melting away. The workouts have been basics: a mix of 45-minute base runs, two-hour bike rides (once per week) and masters swim workouts. I'm sure a physiologist could explain it to me, but I find it compelling how I had assumed all the stiffness I was feeling, not to mention having thrown my back out a three times in three months, was simply a matter of being older. At this point, my diet hasn't been anything to brag about: it's been scattershot, doing well half the time, and the other half the time missing lunch quite often and drinking an extra cup of coffee to fill the void (a fiction, of course). Regardless, the consistent mix of training, with an occasional off-day, seemingly has swept out the stiffness.

Brian has asked me to look for an Olympic-distance race scheduled around the end of February. I said sure thing, and felt the instant zap of adrenalin when you sense a race on the horizon. I said, "That's not too far away," to which Brian responded (we were talking on the phone, but I could see the guy smiling as he said this), "No, it isn't." The subtext of which was immediately clear to me--the prospect of a race commitment puts the workout of today into greater focus. Of course, it also makes it fun. "That's the magic of it," I replied. Indeed, you can always count on the omnipotent motivational power of flicking a stamped envelope containing a race entry into the mailbox.

Comeback Theory

In the midst of week one, grinding the gears back into training. It's not pretty. I'm like a rusted-out Datsun from 1979.

Coach Brian Walton, and the rest of the Cadence coaching gang, use trainingpeaks.com to transmit information back and forth to their athletes. It's some high end tech, especially if you have the tools to upload workout data from the various machines you train with. Like heart rate monitors and Computrainers. I've never used this level of technology. I have used heart rate monitors in the past, but never the uplink-to-computer bling. I have a new Polar 625x heart-rate monitor that I hope to get rigged up to a computer this weekend. The same with a Computrainer. I've never been so geeked out in my life. I'm riding a Kuota Kebel, which I'm looking to sweeten with a Polar power meter. I'll be a two-legged exercise physiology lab.

There's a lot of hype, pro and con, on the virtues of super technology. As in anything, it's just a meaningless pile of hardware unless there's brainpower and effort being circulated through it. Clearly though, technology has made long-distance coaching work. Coaches and athletes emailing workout plans and reports back and forth was the first level. Cadence is an example of the high-end possibilities now being explored by coaches. You get specificity and accountability. The machines don't bend the truth. If you run with your running computer for six miles at 8-minute pace with a heart-rate at 145, and the computers talk through an interface, the coach is going to know exactly what you did.

I saw a bit of what they're up to at the Cadence Kona Challenge in NYC a few weeks ago, where they picked six winners to coach throughout the year toward an Ironman (they also won tons of schwag, including a custom made carbon-fiber Cyfac tri bike). Using Computrainers, treadmills and specially written computer code and other wizardry, they get a detailed look at what you're doing on the bike. I haven't gone through their testing protocol yet, but the Kona Challenge athletes did, and went away with a composite look at their strengths, weaknesses, training zones and potential for improvement.

So this weekend I plan to spend time wiring together my little home-based exercise-phys lab. This week, the workouts Brian has been giving me are meant to get my body back into training without injuries. I would say it's especially good to have a coach be the architect of a return to training from a long, horrible layoff. As running coach Jack Daniels has written, one of the most common mistakes someone in my situation makes is trying getting back to quickly; the memories in the brain of being fit training hard seduce you into doing something stupid. With Brian coaching me, all I need to focus on is the workout that he has given me for the day and the preparations I need to make for the workout tomorrow. I just focus on getting it done. It's a relief.

Once more into the breach

I am the editor of Triathlete Magazine and I have a confession: While I can boast about having posted some decent running results in my life, as a triathlete I've pretty much been a hack. As a runner in the early to mid-1990s, I was extremely disciplined and focused in my training, my lone obstacle being the occasional injury (some light, some not so light) that would derail me. During that time, I worked with several coaches, and under their direction knocked out a series of decent PRs over a wide range of distances, from a 4:06 1500-meter run (as a 30-year-old) to a 2:38 marathon.

I started with Triathlete in 1996, and while I'd survived a number of races, from Wildflower to Escape From Alcatraz, I had never truly applied myself the way I had as a runner. And as I submersed myself in the sport as an editor, my training and racing was far more scattershot. It's now late 2007, and while I have to my credit five Ironman finishes, I have yet to work with a good coach, and I have yet to apply myself with the sort of discipline and energy I know I'm capable of. To sum up my five Ironmans: it was more about the beer after the race than anything.

And now, feeling a beat up and very out of shape at the age of 44, six-foot tall and cracking 200 lbs on my Tanita scale, my desire is to do see what working under a good coach and within a good program can do.

Right now I feel the following: overweight, stiff and with lower back and right knee grumblings. I feel tired, and after a long season of covering the sport of triathlon, I ironically feel the distant from the sport, farther away from feeling any bit of fitness than I have in some time.

In the past few months I've made two visits to the Cadence Cycling and Multisport center in New York City. It's one of the most remarkable creations I've come upon: I was expecting to see a high end bike shop, but what I in fact saw was a training center, open to triathletes of all levels, that one would expect would only be open to world-class athletes. Professional-level coaching, cutting-edge technology and a no-holds-barred approach to coaching and developing an athlete regardless of talent or age. Their services are expensive, for sure, but not surprising considering the quality and comprehensiveness they package.

A few days before the Hawaii Ironman, I met with Brian Walton, the head of Cadence coaching and a former elite cyclist from Canada. In a questionairre I had told Walton about the true state of my rock-bottom fitness level, and my desire to try and overhaul myself into a true Ironman triathlete. Not just a guy who goofs around with his training and serves up enough teeth-gritting to get through an Ironman, but to actually follow the Cadence program and see what I can come up with.

In addition to see what a high-quality triathlon program and the modern-day technologies that allow a coach like Walton to work with me from a long distance (Walton works out of the Philadelphia Cadence store; I live and work in San Diego), I hope to shed some insight on the process that the six winners of the Cadence Kona Challenge will be experiencing as they spend their training year's shooting for success in a North American Ironman competition (Triathlete Mag will be following their progress starting with an introduction in the January issue).

In this blog I will be reporting to you on the Cadence system, with all the high, hard-science and coaching experience that they'll mow through me with, and also the details of how this attempt at overhauling a junker goes.