Training Tip Tuesday #12- The Twelve Days of Christmas: Triathlete Style

In the spirit of Christmas and holiday cheer, I present a triathlete's rendition of the 12 days of Christmas for your reading and viewing pleasure.

On the first day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
An Ironman registration FREE!

On the second day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
2 times compression and,
an Ironman registration FREE!

On the third day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
3 stress fractures,
2 times compression and,
an Ironman registration FREE!

On the fourth day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
4 hour ride,
3 stress fractures,
2 times compression and,
an Ironman registration FREE!

On the fifth day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
fi-ive In-su-lated bottles…
4 hour ride,
3 stress fractures,
2 times compression and,
an Ironman Registration FREE!

On the sixth day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
6 mile repeats,
fi-ive In-su-lated bottles…
4 hour ride,
3 stress fractures,
2 times compression and,
an Ironman Registration FREE!

On the seventh day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
7 saddle sores
6 mile repeats,
fi-ive In-su-lated bottles…
4 hour ride,
3 stress fractures,
2 times compression and,
an Ironman Registration FREE!

On the eighth day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
8 cups of coffee
7 saddle sores
6 mile repeats,
fi-ive In-su-lated bottles…
4 hour ride,
3 stress fractures,
2 times compression and,
an Ironman Registration FREE!

On the ninth day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
9… 10 Garmin XT
8 cups of coffee
7 saddle sores
6 mile repeats,
fi-ive In-su-lated bottles…
4 hour ride,
3 stress fractures,
2 times compression and,
an Ironman Registration FREE!

On the tenth day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
10 x 100's free
9… 10 Garmin XT
8 cups of coffee
7 saddle sores
6 mile repeats,
fi-ive In-su-lated bottles…
4 hour ride,
3 stress fractures,
2 times compression and,
an Ironman Registration FREE!

On the eleventh day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
11 energy gels
10 x 100's free
9… 10 Garmin XT
8 cups of coffee
7 saddle sores
6 mile repeats,
fi-ive In-su-lated bottles…
4 hour ride,
3 stress fractures,
2 times compression and,
an Ironman Registration FREE!






On the twelfth day of Christmas my coach gave to me…
12 salt capsules
11 energy gels
10 x 100's free
9… 10 Garmin XT
8 cups of coffee
7 saddle sores
6 mile repeats,
fi-ive In-su-lated bottles…
4 hour ride,
3 stress fractures,
2 times compression and,
an Ironman Registration FREE!

Training Tip Tuesday #11- Swim Fast to Swim Fast

A big issue I see with many triathletes is that they don't swim fast enough. "It's not my fault I can't swim fast," you may say. "I'm not a professional at this." I'm not talking about fast in an absolute sense but rather a relative one. Whatever is fast for you is fast. To put it another way- most triathletes don't swim HARD often enough. Now, I don't like using the word "hard" to describe any form of swimming because swimming harder doesn't necessarily mean swimming faster. BUT, to get better at swimming you do need to swim hard. And fast. And figure out how to swim hard quickly and fast easily. Makes sense right?

The problem with swimming fast is that it's more painful than swimming slow. The problem with swimming slow is that you swim slow if you swim slow. Most triathletes get in the pool 2 or 3 times a week. They'll do a nice long warm up, some kicking with fins, plenty of catch up, finger tip drag and fist drill work then maybe slap on a pair of huge, oversized paddles and knock out 5x200 of pulling. Don't be ashamed if this is you. It's me as well. Now, drills and paddles have their place but they are not a replacement for hard work. The beauty (and curse) of swimming is that it's non-impact and so we can push ourselves much harder without the danger of breaking down. If you are swimming four times a week or less I'd argue that EVERY time you swim you should have some sort of fast swimming involved. It may look different every time but it should be there. Your stroke will improve and you will swim faster for it.

Yes, you need some endurance work to swim an Ironman or even a half. But for most people it's not the endurance that is their limiting factor, it's their speed.

Ways to swim fast

1) Join a masters group
I'm a huge fan of swimming in a group. Having a coach on deck screaming at you and hurling pull buoys is a phenomenal way to get motivated. Swimming with other people is much more fun and you will automatically work harder without thinking about it. You usually spend all your time trying to catch the feet in front of you that you forget your heart is pounding and your lungs feel like they may explode. If your masters group does mainly sprint work don't utterly neglect the aerobic stuff. You can easily get that in on a weekend or an extra swim on your own. San Antonio has a great masters group led by a very knowledgeable coach, Susan Ingraham. A good coach knows when to break down your stroke and work on technique, and when to give you the evil eye and make you shut up and swim. Susan can do both of these + own you in a straight up 100 free.

2) Swim with fins
And no, I don't mean just for kick sets. I mean do some swim sets occasionally with fins. If 1:30 pace is your normal race pace and you slap a pair of fins on, all of a sudden 1:20's feel just as easy. This will teach you how to feel and pull the water while moving at a greater velocity so that when you go back to swimming 1:25's or 1:28's it feels much slower and more comfortable.

3) Sprint as hard as you can
Whether it be a 50, 100 or a 200. Test yourself occasionally and see how fast you can go if you go all out. One set we did with masters last year that was a lot of fun (and a lot of lactic acid) was 6x100 on a 6 minute send off. Sounds like a sissy set doesn't it? Well each 100 was an all out sprint and let me tell you- by the time we were starting #3, 6 minutes was nowhere near a long enough interval. It was pain. Fortunately, I'd only drank 8 oz of chocolate milk before the workout instead of my normal pint so there weren't too many chunks floating in the pool when I was done. Yes, you may feel like you're going to throw up. Yes, your whole body will start to tie up like your swimming through a bowl of jello. Yes, you may taste pennies in your mouth but those are all good signs that you're going as hard as you absolutely can.

Remember,

"It never gets easier, you just go faster."

This is hard swimming. The legendary "Auburn puke session"

Watch more video of 2008 - Top 10 Floswimming Videos on www.floswimming.org

Completely unrelated video I made of some cyclocross racing I did last weekend in Fredericksburg.


Toughcross2013 from Mark Saroni on Vimeo.

Training Tip Tuesday #10- Camp Cobb

The weekend following thanksgiving I organized a small training camp in Tyler, Tx for a small group of pro triathletes. John Cobb and Jeremy Brown at Cobb Cycling were kind enough to help facilitate some of the camp activities and provide us with some meals and a location to base our rides from. It was a low key way for many of us to start easing back into training. We weren't too worried about intervals or splits, just getting some miles in and enjoying spending time with friends. Training camps are a great opportunity to get a focused block of training in without the distractions of work and life. More than just added training, I think one of the biggest benefits of doing a camp is being able to focus more on recovery. We didn't start our activities until 8am most days and the only thing we did between workouts was eat and watch football. As busy triathletes, our days are normally jam packed from dawn to dusk and I always find it refreshing to be able to relax between training sessions without scurrying around.

We had 10 athletes attend the camp. Jeremy Brown, Seth Cooke and Clay Emge our local, Tyler residents. Natalie Bach drove in from Longview for the weekend. The out of towers included Robbie Wade, my wife Jessica and I from San Antonio, Lauren Lewis and Scott Wilkinson from College Station and Ben Hall from the countr- errrr... state, of Louisiana.

We kicked things off on Saturday morning with an easy 3 mile jog and a 1 mile prediction run at the track. The way the prediction run works is everyone tries to guess what time they will run for a mile and no one gets to wear a watch. What makes it even more difficult is the fact that we all started together and no one knew what the scrawny guy in compression socks next to him had put down for a time. As you can see from the picture below, Robbie is basically a human garmin. Maybe he could get a job testing their watches for them. Scott won the award for most horrible pacing abilities.

Next we headed over to Cobb Cycling to change and head out for a bike ride. Clay was kind enough to  tell me the original route I had planned was complete trash and led us on some of the most pleasant, smoothest roads in all of Tyler. We also managed to find a hill or two. Namely the beast-

This sign wasn't there for us but we still received a warm welcome 

You can get a taste of the beast yourself if you care to give "Texas' Hardest Half" a good old-fashioned tri. Steve Farris does an excellent job putting the race on and it is indeed quite challenging. You'll get to see the beauty of East Texas in full force though and there is also a sprint and olympic for the faint of heart and weak of quadricep. www.tritylerhalf.com

We were all pretty horribly out of shape so the originally planned 80 miles quickly turned into 67 and everyone was perfectly ok with that. We adjourned for the afternoon before meeting up for a pizza dinner and watching one of the craziest plays in college football.

Sunday morning kicked off with a 10 mile trail run that quickly turned from easy to steady to hard to balls-to-the-wall-flying-over-rocks-and-roots. I swear I was close to pr'ing my 5k those last 3.1 miles. Fortunately I only rolled my ankle twice and was quickly on my feet before the pack could run me over and disappear into the brush.

Some breakfast and the compulsory chocolate milk had us refueled and ready to hit the pool. Most of us knocked out a good set of-

While Robbie and Seth kept the hot tub bubbling for us.

Finally it was off to Cobb Cycling again for an easy spin. John was kind enough to tell some of us all the things we were doing horribly wrong on our bikes,

and Ben provided the scenery...

Glutes and calves like this are what 2:10 70.3 bike splits are made of

We wrapped up at Jason's deli where John entertained us with some stories from his early days and gave some excellent advice to all the young pro's on how to conduct ourselves as true professionals.

Most of the crew had to head out after that because of school, work or… actually school and work were the only reasons. Ben Hall stuck around with me for a couple more days so we could practice taking our shirts off and eating large amounts of ice cream.

Monday morning we slept in, lazed around Cobb Cycling and bribed them with starbucks coffee for use of their internet. We hit up a noon swim at UT Tyler with the illustrious Bob Hepler of UT Tyler. Bob was my cross country coach in college and has been my mentor and role model for many years.

After our swim we kitted up and jumped on the bikes for a cruisy 3 hour ride around Tyler. I got to examine Ben's glutes for much of this ride and am still very impressed by their strength.

Another plus from this ride was I found out how inept I am at operating a GoPro. We staged many dramatic attacking and pacelining scenes that were apparently never captured and will be forever buried in the annals of history.

We finished things off on Tuesday morning with an easy 8 mile run with Bob. Well, it was easy for us at least...

Now you know why the UT Tyler XC team is so successful.
They have this angry mammal chasing them in every workout.

An easy 2k swim and we were done! Coming out of a camp is always a bit depressing as you have to return to the reality of normal life but I always find myself much more motivated to stay consistent with my training. Getting to spend time with friends and seeing how hard they work every day motivates me to keep working hard so I can wipe the pavement with their faces on race day.

A huge thanks to John and Jeremy at Cobb Cycling for making this weekend possible and for capturing all the media footage. A big thanks is also owed to our home stays, Summer Brenneman and Karen Brown for letting a bunch of smelly triathletes crash their house for the weekend. And finally thanks to UT Tyler for letting us use their pool.

Word on the street is that more camps are in the works and will be offered to the general public in 2014 so stay tuned for more details!!

Training Tip Tuesday #9- A Look at Running Economy: Part 3

I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving and has had some time to work off that delicious turkey, gravy, dressing, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie! Actually, I contend that thanksgiving food is relatively healthy if it weren't for the enormous quantity we feel compelled to consume. How is meat, potatoes, maybe a salad and some rolls bad for you? It's the sheer volume of food that does us in and lays waste to our ambitious holiday goals of staving off the ever reproducing lipids appearing about our torso. Oh well, whatever you ate for thanksgiving I hope it was delicious and enjoyed with friends and family!

To continue our discussion of running economy I will finally divulge what Saunders et al., concluded can actually be done to improve RE. 

1) Altitude exposure

There are various mechanisms that researchers believe may play a role in lowering RE with altitude exposure. However one thing is for sure- numerous studies have found a lower VO2 (oxygen) during a steady state test in athletes following 3 weeks at altitude. The performance gains are well proven but exactly WHY or HOW isn't as conclusive. Studies have shown that Kenyan runners (living and training at altitude) did not "accumulate lactate during running until near very high or peak exercises intensities, and had much lower lactate both at altitude and sea level at high relative exercise intensities." This was in comparison to Scandinavian runners who lived and trained at sea level. One of the reasons for this is thought to be the greater skeletal muscle oxidative enzyme capacity exhibited in Kenyan runners which shifts their metabolism from anaerobic to aerobic. Easier said than done altitude training obviously has it's benefits but the expense and length of time you must remain at altitude doesn't make it a viable option for most of us to improve our RE.

2) Training in the Heat

Slightly easier to attain for those of us living in Texas, a mildly elevated core temperature is thought to increase RE by "increasing the efficient of the working muscle." Heat training promotes an increase in plasma volume and decreased blood viscosity. Another adaptation is the ability to run at a given speed with lower heart rate and core temperature following a period of heat training. For most of us, heat training isn't a choice in the summer and I don't recommend post-poning your runs until 3:00 pm during a warm July day just to accomplish this benefit. The article doesn't state what temperature constituted "heat" training but I'd be willing to guess it isn't 110 degrees that is relatively common for a Texas summer day.

3) Strength Training

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO… I can nearly hear the moans emitting from my laptop speakers. For the most part, us triathlete HATE strength training. And I totally understand and can sympathize with the time-crunched triathlete who is having a hard enough time fitting in three sports a week much less a fourth. Well, the studies are in and other than helping injury prevention (another benefit I think strength training has), strength training can and WILL help you run faster. I apologize for the slightly wordy quotation but I think Saunders et al., summarizes things much more nicely and intelligently than I can-

"Endurance athletes must be able to sustain a high average running velocity for the duration of a race." (That's called going as fast as we can for a long time) "This emphasizes the role of neuromuscular characteristics in voluntary and reflex neural activation, muscle force and elasticity, running mechanics, and the anaerobic capacities in elite endurance runners.” (Helps your brain and sympathetic nervous system fire muscles quickly so you can go fast).

This strength training can be either in the form of heavy-weight training or plyometric type explosive-training. Both have their place and their advantages.

Heavy-weight strength training was shown to enhance RE in well trained triathletes (average VO2max of 69 mL/kg/min, which is very high). If it’s benefitting very high level athletes who are already operating further towards the ceiling of their performance capabilities then chances are it can benefit you as well. A great example of someone promoting this in our local San Antonio community is Jen Rulon, of Endurance-Fit. I highly discourage jumping into deadlifts and deep squats if you don’t have a personal trainer or someone who can coach you in the proper technique.

Plyometric training is very popular with sprinters, throwers, football players and other power athletes but it also has its place in the endurance community. By enhancing the muscles ability to generate power and promoting storage and use of elastic energy plyometric training can help a runner produce more force “without a proportionate increase in metabolic energy requirement.” Basically, you can push off the ground harder and faster without using more oxygen. A good thing! Plyometric training is a little easier to do on your own or with a coach because all you need is some space and lots of sweat. Here are a few basic, introductory drills and plyometrics for runners.

The area of strength training is one I think triathletes and runners have the most room for improvement. If strength training can elicit significant performance gains from elite athletes who are at the very tip of the their ability than it will definitely help beginner, intermediate and advanced triathletes as well.