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.