Let's begin with the training schedule I ended up with for a typical week by mid-spring this year.
| Morning | Evening | |
| Mon |
|
|
| Tue |
|
|
| Wed |
|
|
| Thu |
|
|
| Fri |
|
|
| Sat |
| |
| Sun |
|
|
Though, I never had one week that went according to this schedule. I'm the type who does better without a set training regimen. Some people prefer the opposite, where they know in advance exactly what and how much they'll be doing each week; those people do better with structure. I prefer to listen to my body and to make it up as I go. However, like most everyone else, I don't train within a vacuum; I have “real life” constraints to deal with, and so certain scheduling patterns emerge in even the most structure-less of plans. For example, I find that it's generally easier to train before work when I'm focused and enthusiastic than after work when I'm more inclined to work on, say, composing a blog post.
So we begin with the end. The above schedule marks what I was doing by the time I had gotten myself into good enough shape to be able to train. This itself is an important point: a major intermediate goal of any good training program is to be able to increase the intensity of the training program itself. In this schedule, each day is split into two columns—“morning” and “evening”—which for Monday–Friday clearly distinguishes between workouts done before work and those done after work. The items in brackets ([]) denote workouts that I considered optional or non-essential; I sometimes or frequently didn't do them. The ones not in brackets I considered essential and did most weeks. Doing only the non-bracket workouts would entail 11–13½ hours per week—almost 2 hours per day; doing all workouts would entail 18–22 hours per week—almost 3 hours per day. Keep in mind that I spend an additional hour per day commuting by bicycle as well as walking errands in my car-free lifestyle. This is a lot of exercise—honestly, an unsustainable amount of it. Allow me now to describe a little bit about how I evolved into carrying all this out.
December 2009 – mid-January 2010
This is the first winter I went into with realistic expectations about my fitness. The shorter days, colder temperatures, and holiday atmosphere all conspire to limit my emotional tolerance for training, and so this year I cut back intentionally with the goals of (1) maintaining a good core level of fitness and (2) building enthusiasm for a strong spring.
During this time, I cut out all bicycling except for my year-round utility riding (e.g., commuting to work) and one long ride on the weekends. Because I was only doing one ride, I made that ride a long one—120–180km, 4–7 hours—though of only medium-level intensity, with the goal of “teaching” my body to be comfortable with staying active for long periods of time and not to rely upon sugar alone for fuel. Some people talk about heart rate zones for burning fat and such. There's not really much secret to it; I find that if I want to condition my body to burn fat for fuel, heart rate alone won't get me there; I must train to stay active for half a day or more. And by “active” I mean going uncomfortably fast, not dawdling. (Some of you may wonder why someone with my thin build would worry about burning fat; it's for conditioning my body to use every fuel available to it.)
By not doing my usual morning rides during the week, I was free to run to the gym (1½ miles each way) and do about half an hour of swimming before work. At the time, I was still very much in the beginner phases of learning the front crawl, and my swim workouts mainly entailed swimming laps at a slow speed doing a full catch and focusing on relaxing in the water and becoming smoother and more efficient. These workouts were important for laying a solid foundation for the spring. Giving up most cycling for six weeks or so was a decision that in hindsight now seems brilliant.
On Wednesday nights I played indoor soccer, which constituted good wintertime cross-training.
late-January – February
After the mood of the holiday season dissipated and Wednesday-night soccer ended, I began doing the Tuesday-Thursday morning HOP ride. “Hour of power” is a bit of a misnomer for the ride during winter; Mike, one of the few year-rounders of the ride, calls it the “hour of cold and dark”. The previous six weeks of building up enthusiasm came in handy here; this ride this time of year entails waking up at 4:30AM, donning lots of cold weather clothing, and strapping a good headlight to my helmet. Not many guys show up to do a two-hour morning bicycle ride that ends well before sunrise, and so the pace was not so fast. After a week or two of getting comfortable again in a group, I began focusing on taking multiple, steady pulls at the front at about 40-45kph for a few minutes each. In this way, I treated the ride as an intensity workout, varying between high intensity for a few minutes and recovering for a few minutes, with the goal of increasing my aerobic output. Each week I came back feeling stronger and faster.
Cycling in the morning pushed my swimming sessions into the evenings after work. Sometime in February, I think, I began bricking long runs after my Saturday morning ride, which continued to be long, mainly solo efforts. Also, I made some efforts to run during Thursdays evenings. However, not once this year did I establish consistent training for the run except for those Saturday morning bricks. I run mostly on natural talent and bicycle fitness, which is probably why I've performed inconsistently in races.
March
By March I was feeling like I was on my way to my all-time best level of fitness. I was strong in the Tuesday-Thursday ride, and my swim was coming together. Lady Luck had different plans: I came down with several cold viruses over the course of a few weeks, one of which left me racked with bronchitis. Bronchitis makes endurance training difficult, and I therefore was set back and lost the opportunity to do the Bartlett Lake triathlon, which is my kind of triathlon because the bike course is all climbing—no flat road at all for 40km. Instead, I spent several weeks coughing up phlegm and continuing to work on my swimming.
March highlights an important maxim in training: you can try your hardest but you can't guarantee results.
April – early June
By April I had recovered from bronchitis and was back into my full schedule. The morning rides were predictably gaining in both sunlight and popularity and thus were speeding up. It was jarring to get back up to the increased speed after a few weeks of illness and taking it easy.
For Saturday mornings, I switched from long solo rides to shorter, faster group rides. The idea here is that the previous months' long rides had improved my metabolism and that with a few races coming up, now was the time to go for speed and speed alone. I concentrating at staying in the front of a group as much as possible and pushing hard on climbs. One doesn't get faster by working out at the same speed one has gone in the past.
By May my three-times-a-week swimming schedule had me feeling rundown. Not physically rundown. Emotionally rundown. I was spending an average of about 15 hours per week training (plus that additional hour per day of casual exercise), and I was finding it difficult to work a full-time job, spend time with Laura, blog twice weekly, and continue training. My life was revolving around little else than these four activities, and so I made another switch and began taking an hour lunch break at work to do my swimming at the gym nearby my office. In deciding the priorities of “real life” and training, real life should win out, but sometimes a creative solution will allow for both.
Lastly, I must mention Friday Morning Ride. This is a great ride that makes me appreciate that I live where I live within Phoenix. Though the ride begins and ends in Tempe, the part I do is the five climbs on the south side of Camelback Mountain. The group treats each climb as a separate stage, and with the right, competitive attitude a cyclist can really bust a gut on those steep roads. I show up early and ride the five climbs solo before doing them again with the group. It makes for a 20-mile ride with about 2000ft of intensity-interval climbing (and over half of those 20 miles are flat!).
Final thoughts
The main point of this post is to make training sound like a lot of planning and hard work because it is. There's little way around that (1) you have to know what you're doing and (2) you have to work hard to realize improvement. Even then you need (3) luck, like avoiding injury and illness.
I think it's important to note that hard training is probably not the way to better health. I think that with health as the only consideration, about ten hours per week 1½ hours per day) of moderate exercise (like hiking) with a dash a intense exercise (like sprinting) is optimal. Beyond that and a person is better off focusing on flossing daily and attuning his or her sleeping schedule to the natural rhythms of the day than by adding more exercise. More exercise will make you faster, but I think that speed past a modest level of fitness will yield marginal returns in terms of health benefits. A training schedule like mine is largely luxury and vanity.
And fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment