So, I've been running pretty steadily for about 3 weeks now. Averaging 3 - 4 times per week, between outside, our own treadmill, and various Shera-hilton-iday-Hampton Inn Hotel workout rooms. And sadly, I haven't been losing weight like I had hoped. Here are the two reasons I believe.
1) Travel, work dinners, hotel, and Airport Chili's restaurants. I typically find myself having 2 -3 business dinners / week which usually means a beer or two and some wine. Throw in my natural desire to polish off the bread basket before appetizers, and you couldn't necessarily classify my existence as "carb-free" living.
2) Beer. When I'm home I LOVE beer! Who doesn't? Anyway I have such a refined taste that I'll only drink porters and stouts, and consider a pretty hoppy Pale Ale my light beer. I scoff at Miller Lite, and would rather drink dirty pond water than open a bottle of Michelob Ultra! That's a problem as each beer is the equivalent of 2 pieces of bread. I've no clue how many equivalent loaves of bread I consume in a week. But onto the most important topic of this blog....
3) The way I've been training.... Which consistently means, trying to rush to the treadmill or get my sneakers on and get outside before someone notices I'm gone. I get at most 1/2 hr in and try to run intervals where most of the training is at a heart rate of 150 - 160 bpm. Luckily I can maintain that because that's what I'm accustomed to, but not good for establishing a good "aerobic base". This hit me last week while on the treadmill looking at the various speed / inclinations settings there are categories for a) fat burn, b) aerobic, c) endurance and d) strength according to various speeds. And another chart for heart rates according to age. And for my age, the fat burn zone is around 123 bpm. Everything I've read (and happily disregarded) is that early in training the concept of LSD (Long Slow Distance) inorder to establish an aerobic base and conditioning to build on for future improvements.
I should have known better as my College swim coach back in the early 90's swore by this concept and made sure there were only 2 ways to get your ass screamed at in practice. A) For not swimming slow enough during conditioning sets. That's actually tough when you feel good and want to work out in that 150 - 160 bpm zone. and B) For not swimming fast enough during the speed / endurance sets. The times when you work so hard that you can feel your heart beat in your head, start to get dizzy, and almost throw up.
Coach had a process for establishing the perfect pace time for training. Each swimmer would do a set of 5 X 100 free from the wall at max effort with 10 seconds rest between each. Let's say the times work out to be :53 + :10, 55 + :10, 1:00 + :10, 1:05 +10, 1:10 + :10 for an average of 353 seconds. Divide that by 5 for an average AT time of 1:10 roughly. Then all training was done with a swimmer swimming at a pace close to their AT time. For example a typical practice set would be 3 X 10 x 100 free at AT + 10 seconds, AT + 8 seconds, AT + 5 seconds on 1:30, 1:25, and 1:20 second intervals. And the team was divided into lanes based on like AT times. This test was done 3X per year.... 3 weeks into practice, right before the 2 week florida training trip, and right before taper. It was amazing to see how our averages came down because the splits of the 4th and 5th 100's improved so much due to conditioning thru the season.
So, what does all of this mean to me and Triathlon training? A) I'm eating wrong (handle that in a different posting after I eat like Kobiashi on New Years), and B) I'm training wrong and in the wrong zone. Above is an example of a training run I did on Sunday Night. As you can see I'm way out of my zone, and was very frustrated. My naturally inclination was to run at the 150 160 bpm range and as I set my alarm on the HRM, I found myself stopping to walk to get back down into that base building zone. Ideally (without data) I think I need to be in the 120 - 130 zone but I haven't done any testing to find out where I should be. So I found a great article at beginnertri.com
on how to establish the correct training zone to build a base. It consist of a pretty grueling test similar to that described above in the pool. So my plan is to train in the 120 - 130 range for at least an hour a day 4 - 5 days per week, and maybe long walks or family hikes on the off days for the next 3 weeks. And then do the test on a Saturday outlined here.
So that's pretty much my plan for the next Month as this is a figure it out as you go Tri training program. In closing a few more things to work on. A) Figure out how to cycle to the office (hopefully travelling will slow down and I only live 5 miles from work. B) Get the bike down and pump up the tires.
-Dave
No comments:
Post a Comment