How to do Big Training Days Back-to-Back Without Soreness

Can You Train While Sick?

Tips on Healthy Nutrition for Endurance Training

Out on a long bike ride, eating guacamole sandwiches while being chased by dogs and talking about Tim Ferriss.  Have you read his book, The Four-Hour Body?  It's in bookstores, Amazon, and the audio book is available on Audible.com

Weekly Totals and Review, Dec. 13th Through 19th.

 Another strong week, but with a different strategy and it's own issues. I've had a lot of success with increasing workouts to maximal efforts at the end, but I've cut down on the frequency of those since I know they have limited returns.  A few in a week is a good thing, but making most of your workouts like that will exhaust you and make you prone to injury.  So, I've cut back on the number of them some and allowing the growth to slow a little bit.

Beautiful location, great training, awesome results

We also had to travel out of town again and it's tough getting in workouts when you've got to travel six or seven hours on the weekend.  Once in a while is one thing, but this time of year is full of weekends like that.  Meh.

Anyway, I got in over 50 miles of running again, and that's really good stuff. I'm also getting extremely good at getting in and staying in zone 2, which is an indicator of excellent endurance and nutrition.  On top of all that, the max I can get my HR to hit is climbing and so is my LT, which is awesome for overall speed.  I'm hoping that soon I'll be able to get in over 15 hours per week and really build up some mega endurance and speed for Ironman racing.

You can click on the bolded workout titles to see the HR graphs and more.

Monday AM - 3300 yard swim, 48:25 minutes

The nutrition of "One Bowl Method" continues to unfold and impress! This is the first time in recent memory where I got up on Monday morning with plenty of energy to go swim.

Got a late start due to recording a little bit of audio for the podcast.

Form work - Noticed that the legs are a red flag for your form. If they aren't straight and resistance-free (no wiggling), then you are working sideways through the water. Bad! Get as neutral as possible.

Monday PM - 1 hour run on treadmill, 6.93 miles

Nice little breakthrough run. My new "easy" pace is 8:13 min/mile at 140 BPM. That's a big jump from 10:00 min/mile and 120 BPM. This improvement has everything to do with eating less and speedwork. 

I'm also going to label the 7 MPH button on the treadmill "Kona" and everything slower as "Fail". I like that. A lot.

Tuesday AM - 1 hour Bike ride on rollers, 20.0 miles

Another breakthrough workout. I've upped my threshold by around 10 BPM and improved strength tremendously. I can tell that my muscles give out before my lungs, so there's strength to gain for sure. 

Did this with no TV, just listening to a Pandora station made up of Lamb of God, Static-X, and Korn. Decided during this ride that I'm going to do my damnest to qualify for Kona.

Tuesday PM - 1 hour barefoot run on treadmill, 7.22 miles

Hard run, trying to find top end of potential of sustained effort before failure. Looks like it is about 162 BPM and 6:30 pace at the moment. When I hit that, both hamstrings freaked out with twinges of pain, so I shut it down and backed off.

Excellent speed workout. Bare feet got so hot that I had to soak them in cold water to cool them off!

Wednesday AM - 55 minute swim, 3900 yards, 1:26 pace.

Bumped up the pace to 1:26 per 100 yds based on the last swim on a 1:28 being a little easy. Well, I set myself up for a workout with this one! I struggled a bit towards the end trying to keep the pace. I spent a good portion of the swim exploring different stroke techniques and appropriate times to exert more muscle strength within the stroke pattern itself. Good swim.

Wednesday evening - 1 hour push run, 6.44 miles

Outdoor run with Roxy, mixing in core work while running easy. Did 15 push ups and 10 squats every 10 minutes. Did 6 pull ups each of the four times I passed the monkey bars on the local playground. Ran easy, sped up during the second half, trying to get close but not past LT.

Thursday Morning - 20.65 mile bike on rollers, 1 hour

Hell YEAH! This "Heartbreaker" workout continues to blow me away. I warmed up and hit 140 BPM at 20 minutes in and then elevated my heart rate 1 BPM every minute until failure. I could feel my LT hit at 155 and kept going until 167. Just a week ago, my LT was 140 and failure was around 160. Huge improvements with a simple workout.

I recovered for a few seconds and then finished the hour in the Pain Cave - hovering at the edge of LT.

Friday Morning - Barefoot treadmill run, 1 hour, 8 miles.

No HR graph because my watch picked up the footpod on my shoe in the closet and thought I wasn't moving.

No run last night because I drank too much caffeine yesterday and then felt like crap.

Put Pandora on some super evil sh*t and let it fly. Kept escalating speed and HR until I hit 9.6 MPH (treadmill goes to 10) and 170 bpm at the end of the hour. That's a 6:18 pace! Totally in Kona Qualifier Mode. Hell Yeah.

Saturday Morning - 1.5 hour push-run, 10.77 miles

At Emily's family's place for X-mas. They live on the outskirts of Tyler, TX. Nice and rural with plenty of big hills. Got the HR up into zone 2 (first part of HR graph is off) and then stayed there. Ran a mix of country roads and Tollroad 49. Great run. Already getting frustrated with food options. Might have to go to grocery store next visit.

Did 15 pushups and squats every 10 minutes for the last hour.

Cycling ninja.

Saturday Afternoon - 3 hour bike ride, 50 miles

Great three hour ride, if a little cold. Stayed in zone 3 except when chased by dogs and maxing out twice at the end. You can see my energy levels fading slightly due to underfueling and then pick back up at hour three after eating a guacamole sandwich.

Good hill at the end of bike/run workouts used to max out.

Sunday morning - 2 hour run, 14 miles

Started off running with Emily, shot a video, then she turned back and I kept going. Great run, getting very strong at staying in zone 2. Capped off the run with a maximal effort on the last hill. HR graph is wonky because I lost GPS signal a few times.

Weekly Totals and Review, Dec. 6th Through 12th.

It was another great week of realizing more potential with some harder work.  The bike and swim numbers are a little down due to having a head cold, but the runs were solid.  With the Rocky Raccoon 100 coming up, running takes a priority whenever there's a choice to be made.

I'm now recording the comments as quickly as possible after the workouts and I'm finding a huge benefit from this.  It burns in the head what you need to remember for better results.  I've also elevated my lactic thresholds by around 10 BPM or more using some very simple techniques I want to talk about on my next podcast.  

Enough small talk.  Let's get down to the nitty gritty.  Each workout title is linked to a HR and distance graph on Suunto's website.  Click on them and get a good look at how it all went down.

Monday PM - 1 hour run, barefoot, treadmill, 6.15 miles.

Was feeling sleepy (which is a recurring problem) and then ate a spoon of honey and a slice of bread with guacamole and felt much better. @Mchristian called me and I got on the treadmill and knocked out 6.15 miles in 1 hour, barefoot. Had to run 6:27 pace at the end to get HR above 160. Flyin'!

Tuesday AM - Bike ride on rollers, 55 minutes, 16.06 miles.

Started off super easy and listening to the Marc Maron WTF podcast. Kicked it over to some crazy sh*t on Pandora after about 20 minutes and started ramping it up. Legs started burning pretty good around 153 BPM, so I ended it at 155. Worked on trying to get waterbottle out of the cage while moving, which was extremely wobbly. Felt like I had lost just a tiny bit of strength due to not biking as much last week.

Tuesday PM - Outdoor run, 6.34 miles

Took Roxy with me for the first 30 minutes and let her have fun and sniff it up in the dark and misty rain. Dropped her off and then couldn't elevate speed because stabilization muscles were "wobbly". Felt fine other than that. Got into the "pain cave" and just stayed in the front hall of that instead. 

Wednesday AM - 4050 yd. swim on a 1:29/100 interval

Set the timer on my Suunto to a 1:29 pace interval and swam at an easy/moderate pace. I settled in nicely after a while and was really enjoying it. Sprinkled chia seeds on my cereal for the first time before this and got a huge energy boost. Nice stuff!

Thursday - Sick with sinus infection

Friday AM - 1 hour barefoot run on treadmill, 6.95 miles.

I skipped a day of working out due to feeling a little sleepy and also a sinus infection. This run was especially nice, doing the "heartbreaker" method - warming up for 30 minutes and then ramping up one beat per minute for the rest of the hour.

Friday PM - Easy run, 7.1 miles, 1:10

Second run of the day, so went out at an easy pace. First half hour was with Roxy, then just easy after that. It was misting rain off and on and the Christmas lights in the neighborhood were cool to look at.

Saturday AM - 3 hour bike ride, 17.3 mph, 52.1 miles

I totally nailed the nutrition on this, and that's a big deal. I got it!
Breakfast - Ezekiel cereal with some chia seeds and honey.
Pre-ride - 1 banana.
Ride - 1.5 scoops of Perpetuem per hour and 17.5 oz. of Amy and Brian's Coconut Juice with some chia seeds mixed in.
Drank water when mouth was dry, drank coconut juice when lightheaded (needed the sugar), and ate Perpetuem when stomach felt hungry. QUIT LISTENING TO YOUR HEAD AND LISTEN TO YOUR BODY INSTEAD!

Saturday PM - 1 hour run, 6.5 miles, barefoot on treadmill

Just a moderate run, enjoying being barefoot.  Impressive cold front came through and I've got kids to watch overnight, so ran indoors.  Roxy is bugging me to run outside, but she'll have to sit this out.

Sunday AM Run - 9.53 miles, 1.5 hours, treadmill

Started out reading Lava magazine, studying the details of each page, then practiced feeling each part of the body, starting from the toes and then moving up. It was a nice moderate run, just getting in mileage at the door of the Pain Cave.

The HRM was going a little crazy at first. Nibbled on a mix of dates, pumpkin seeds, almonds, cashews, raisins, and cranberries.

Sunday PM - 1.5 hour barefoot run on treadmill, 9.39 miles

HR graph is incomplete because the watch finally ran out of memory! Not surprised with the volume of HR data I've been collecting.

Had a nice level of energy, so I knocked this one out earlier than usual. Talked with Morgan on the phone for the first hour, then jammed out to Incubus for the rest. This run puts me over 50 miles for the week and I'm done! 

The only thing I ate for the entire time was some chia seeds sprinkled in a water bottle that was 50/50 coconut juice and water.

Totals:

13:06 hours, 122.4 miles

Individual sport totals:

Running - 8:11 hours, 51.96 miles

Cycling - 3:56 hours, 68.16 miles

Swimming -1:00 hours, 2.30 miles