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.