I'm A Radiator...So Are You

It was warm and sunny, last Sunday morning, as we began our eight-mile jaunt.  By the time Charley, Teri, Suzanne and I reached our bottle stash at two miles I knew the middle four miles were going to be, er, interesting.  As we approached the turn-around point, Teri mentioned something about the heat and asked where the (moving) “air” was.  Fortunately we realized the reason for the “warmer” conditions had to do with the fact we were walking with a breeze to our back.  Immediately we began to feel, perhaps not more comfortable, but at least a little less-overheated.

We’re not running at a fast pace this time of the year, so I have more time (and oxygen going to my brain) to think about things, especially when people pass by on their run/walk/bike.

‘Why is it,’ I asked to no one in particular, ‘I see a whole lot of cyclists training for an upcoming triathlon with empty bottle cages on their bikes; why there are no water bottles in those cages?’

Perhaps they are a special breed of triathlete; they are part camel and don’t need water.

Perhaps they have never had a flat tire or a mechanical situation they could not fix on their own, so they didn’t have to wait for bike support, or worse, have to walk their bike for a long distance.

Or, perhaps it’s simple ignorance.

I’m a radiator.  And if you’re human so are you.  And when that cooling system fails, we can, too.  A 160-pound person participating in a high-intensity sport can have their ability to perform (power) limited by almost 50 percent by a four-pound decrease in body weight.  That same 160-pound athlete, if they’re participating in an endurance event, can see a 5-percent decrease in running efficiency with the same amount of fluid loss.  Take another pound or two of body weight away and that drop in running efficiency goes up to 30 percent, depending on the event distance; the longer the distance means a greater decrease in efficiency

And that same 160-pounder, should they lose 8 or 9 pounds of fluid, can find their normal endurance to do a low-intensity activity, such as walking or easy cycling, cut in half.

I can speak from hard experience that hydration, especially in the summer, is important.  A near-fainting episode during an aerobics class two decades ago proved to me just how a “small” fluid loss can lead to a big problem.  I never thought until that time about how much I did sweat during workouts.  But I’m reminded every time I spin, run on a treadmill, or hit the cardio machine at my gym.  That puddle was originally inside of me, part of my blood which was sent to the capillaries near my skin. 

Unlike our automobiles we don’t have a sealed cooling system.  Our sweat glands, nostrils, mouth and (to a degree) our genitourinary system leak like the proverbial colander.  Sweating decreases blood volume, which means our blood cells have less fluid through which to travel and becomes more thick.  And even if we’re not noticeably sweating on colder days we still lose fluid by exhaling water vapor.

So we need to put fluid back in to replace what is lost. 

I recently mentioned that exercise activity (workouts) of lower intensity, or less than an hour in duration, can be served by plain (cool) water as tolerated during the activity.  Don’t forget about post-workout replenishment by the 150 percent of body weight change (loss) during the exercise period guide.  Don’t feel like taking it all in immediately?  No problem.  Just make certain to drink over the next few hours as tolerated. 

Workouts which go beyond 60 minutes need not only rehydration, but replacement of carbohydrates, protein and electrolytes which are being used.  Every person is an experiment of one; every person has a favorite sports beverage for their long workout.  My recommendation is to find the beverage which best suits your palate, your gut, and your wallet, in that order; the best sports drink in the world for you is the one which ends up in your gut and not in your sports bottle.  The beverage manufacturers know this, also; one particular sports drink, until about two decades ago, tasted more (to this writer’s palate) like powdered drink mixed with seawater.  At that point they developed several different flavor combinations (including iced tea, which I loved) and adjusted the level of salts and sugars in the formula.  (Add a marketing campaign with a dominant basketball player, and the rest, as you say…)

While you might not necessarily think you need to rehydrate on the run it’s always better – as people like to say – to have it and not need it, rather than need it and not have it.  Be prepared.

Coach Don Corleone Meets Coach Donna Reed

I recently wrote about the need for honesty between athlete & coach. Really, the relationship between athlete & coach is not much different than between friends, family members or lovers. Honest interaction is essential. Nobody wants to associate with a dishonest person, even if they are blood relatives...some families are more rigid about honest & ethical behavior than others. But sometimes, even in the tightest of families, small variances may - & often do - exist.

My father & my (late) uncle both worked for many years in law enforcement, encountering many of my contemporaries during their late adolescence & on into adulthood...occasionally I heard the "war stories" from my father; sometimes I heard them from my buddies. While my father & my uncle both worked to enforce the law, they differed in one aspect: My uncle was a "black-and-white" kind of person, whereas my father often saw in shades of gray...at least until the vulgarities began to fly.I know they disagreed on many fronts during their time together in this existence, but there still was a clearly understood truth: They were definitely family.

I have to (sheepishly) admit I lean more toward my uncle's "black-and-white" worldview when it comes to the issue of honest communication between athlete & coach. The "shades of gray" side I picked up from my father comes to the fore when I look at approaches to training; some come out a tad more gray than others. But, since every athlete is an experiment of one, the training approaches are gray none the less. So, what is the goal of a coach? During a discussion between three well-known triathlon coaches in the summer of 2007, one considered the goal of a coach to "enable athletes to make decisions for themselves." The three considered the ideal coaching scenario to serve in an active, hands-on role in training the athlete for one year. After a year, the athlete could work more on their own. The coach would then serve as a support rather than a crutch.

I like the idea of being a hands-off coach for an athlete after a year or two. But, like almost every other idea, it's not quite so smooth or comfortable when the reality arrives. Most people are not good at communicating the "why" when it comes time to leave, mostly because they don't like the conflict or wounded feelings which follow. Makes perfect sense to me; because the departures & separations have been traditionally more permanent than temporal I'm the type of person who hates goodbyes of any sort. Even my mother considers me the kind of person who would rather have everyone as my friend. Keep your friends close & your enemies list short.

Every so often I get to listen to what I like to call "Exercises in Conflict Resolution." My wife works as upper management for a small company & often has to deal with uncomfortable business issues. When she tells me her intended response, or drafts a written communication I often advise her to be more like Don (Michael) Corleone (in The Godfather) & less like Donna Reed (in It's A Wonderful Life). Think about how each have dealt with a sticky situation...

Donna Reed: [trapped naked in a bush] Shame on you! I'll tell your mother!
Jimmy Stewart: [thoughtfully] My mother's way up on the corner there.
Reed: I'll call the police.
Stewart: They're way downtown. Anyway, they'd be on my side.



Corleone: Where does it say that you can't kill a cop?
Hagen: Come on, Mikey...
Corleone: Tom, wait a minute....I'm talking about a...crooked cop who got mixed up in the rackets & got what was coming to him....
[Hagen nods]
Corleone: And the newspapers might like a story like that.
Hagen: They might, they just might.
Corleone: [to Sonny] It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business.So, you have the choice of emotionally responding to conflict, and hope the antagonist responds in a rational manner. Or you can emotionally detach yourself from what might be described as an unsavory response to a conflict...


But, clear & honest communication between athlete & coach can head off potential conflicts at the pass. It's strictly business.

It's a Rebus, Ya Butthead...

(A tip of the swim cap/cycling helmet/running visor to "Chuckie V" Veylupek. A little more obscure & cryptic than his road sign, but hey! That's the way I am, right?)

So, the end of the calendar year is always great fun for me. Not only does it allow me to scale back the running or cycling I do in order to spend more quality time - running - with my wife, I also get to play my favorite puzzle game, called "What The Heck Did We Do Wrong This Year?"

Well, it's not the official name of the game, but it's the working title for what new twist do we want to try in our training to replace the things that didn't do so well last year? I know, it's not as catchy as Scrambled Eggs, which was the working title for one of the greatest pop tunes of the past fifty years (kudos to anyone who knows the title - I don't have anything special I can give, short of my admiration!), but it will have to do.

Last year I tossed the fairly-well tried-and-true three weeks on, one week off training intensity cycle right out the window for a shorter three/four/five day on, one day off cycle. Unfortunately, I don't control all of the workout factors; I can swim up to six days a week (seven if I wish to engage in open-water!), and I can bike, run or do strength training almost any time I please. But sometimes I like the idea of getting out on a ride, or a social run, with a friend. We're social animals, we humans. While we may not have identical training goals & our physiological make-up varies by chronological & training age, there are times we like to have someone else suffering along with us.

So, this year I have decided to carpe the damned diem...seize the day. There are enough social-like training-like situations where I can get the necessary intensity in without feeling like the Lone Doggone Ranger. Rather than focus strictly on hard mileage/yardage, I've borrowed from a number of guides to gauge the volume & the balance between the disciplines.

The first guide is from Joe Friel's The Triathlete's Training Bible (I have the next-to-most-recent-edition). Since I'm focusing on two IM 70.3 events this year & I'm a middling-to-back-of-the-pack (blame it on my swimming) participant, I'm looking at the middle of Friel's 500-to-700 hours of training per year window. So, when I look at the amount of time I spent this year it's not going to be a big change, time-wise (this makes my wife very happy!). Friel has a week-by-week breakdown through each of the base, build, and prep cycles leading to the event, & the events are far enough apart to give me a chance to re-cycle through base & build in the summer.

Even neater than this, Friel lays out a division of hours per day for each week. Sundays have the most time available; which seems in line with most middle-class triathletes, & the week slowly tapers off in hours for training, with Saturday being the shortest day of the week, where your most intense stuff, or your C & B races, fit in. But there are days where my swim work is 'etched in stone' because of my masters' group, & the twice-weekly Six At Six beatdown is becoming a regular thing again...so there's a healthy chunk of the week taken up. But it's probably a better thing to have a little too little training volume than too much, right? I doubt if anyone ever got injured from undertraining over time.

The second tool is Dan Empfield's aerobic points system. For me to get out & run 8-to-12 miles on the weekend, 8 miles in the middle of the week, & five-to eight miles worth on the elliptical trainer (or treadmill, if I'm not too beat up) may...or may not...be such a good thing, especially in light of how badly I swim. Empfield's point of view, as well as many other coaches is race your strengths, train your limiters.

(If you're strictly running you will be better served by Jack Daniels' points system, which is published in the latest version of Daniels' Running Formula. But if you're a beginner tri-geek you might want to use this guide to keep your training balanced...so you don't spend too much time working on the stuff in which you are already good.)

Empfield's system works like this:
1 mile cycling = 1 point

1/4 mile running (~400 meters on track!) = 1 point

100 meters (yards) swimming = 1 point

I did a little bit of adaptation because of my tendency to beat myself up on the run: If I use the elliptical trainer (with a heart rate monitor!), I'll divide the time spent on the ET by 2.4-to-3.3 (2.4 if the average heart rate is closer to maximum, 3.3 if the average is closer to 50 percent) and give that score to the ET workout. (In essence, it's a way to equate elliptical trainer with cycle!) So, 25 miles of running might equate to 100 miles on the bike or 10,000m (yd) in the pool.

A hard-core runner might not need to develop strength by hitting the weight room, & some triathlon coaches consider hitting the pool to be better than pumping iron. Empfield prefers weights, so, every five minutes pumping weight (after 20 minutes) earns a point. A one-hour session would give you 12 points, but that assumes no lollygagging, definitely a hard-core weight session.

If there's a weakness in your training or you aren't certain how to balance out life & training, or the disciplines for which you are training, it helps to figure out what some of the good coaches are doing or telling their charges...might work for you; might not. We're all an experiment of one. Don't do the same thing over again if you're looking for different results.

In Essentials, Unity

'In essentials, unity. In nonessentials, liberty. In all things, charity.' - (att.) John Wesley & St. Augustine
The more you read any of the training books or magazines, regardless of the sport, the more likely you are to ask yourself, 'dude, are these guys (gals) all saying the same thing, or am I imagining it?' News flash: As a whole there's not a whole lot new underneath the sun...regardless of that 12 Weeks To Your First Ironman or Five Weeks To Your 5K Personal Best book (the former) or magazine article (the latter)...and the article always has the title in BIG, HONKING LETTERS so you can't miss it on the news stand.

In the same fashion that a religion (or church) has its major handful of tenets which ideally everyone holds in common, nearly every coach who has spent enough time in classroom study or real-world experience knows there are some basic fundamental laws of training. Some find a way to write books & magazine articles about them, or based upon them; the really good writers find a way to put it in an entirely new & different language so the casual observer/layman/prospective book/magazine buyer will snap it up. Think of Pringles. It's still a potato chip, no matter how you look at it. While it has a uniform shape, size & texture, it's still based on a potato that has been cooked & seasoned. It was just packaged differently & made to look prettier.
Face it. Base-building isn't pretty. There's no way to gloss over speed work. Time trials are always going to be time of discomfort. And nobody ever talks about recovery or rehabilitation. And heaven forbid you even discuss injuries. So we're always going to deal with semantics, with trying to sell some aspect of training that no athlete particularly likes by giving it a mystical name.

There's nothing mystical about it. The secret is there are no secrets.

'I am of Paul...I am of Cephas...I am of Apollos...' - Paul of Tarsus (1st Century CE)

When I look at books written by Bingham, Daniels, Galloway, Glover, Henderson, Higdon, & so on, most of them try to say the same thing. Don't take this is a stab at my friends (John, Hal...) who have written these books. There is a degree of discipline & sacrifice involved to be a runner (or a triathlete!), but when it is all said & done, the proof of the pudding is on race day, & very few of the runners will wear their allegiance on their sleeve, er, singlet. Even fewer will put credit where credit is due; their own hard work, trusting the book writer's guidance & counsel & translating it into meaningful training & successful execution on the day when it did count.

The most successful runners & triathletes are not products of the program of the month club. Very few of the most successful running or triathlon coaches write best-selling books. Why? Because they understand two things:

There are physiological essentials which must be achieved in a certain order, lest the whole house of cards come down.

Every athlete is an experiment of one. But it's not the article & book writers who are the most dangerous, but their adherents (of which I might be called by some). There are athletes & group leaders who possess a sense of parochialism, to the point of orthodoxy. 'If you don't follow this to the letter you aren't going to be successful,' say some. Or worse yet, they will guarantee unqualified success in their prescribed training endeavor.

The one-size-fits all coaches can make for lousy prophets. The adherents can make for lousy judges.

All About Soul

Had to juggle a boatload of stuff this morning on my way out the door...of course, those mornings where I meet the man with the rubber stick mean a longer stay in bed, and a shorter window of time to get to the gym without p!$$!ng someone off because they are on the last spinning bicycle with Look pedals...and they're wearing running shoes...and there's another bike they can ride. As always, another story. Actually, it wasn't the moment of getting out the door to the car that was entertaining. It was getting from the car to the locker after the spinning workout. Clean clothes, water bottles, Snickers Marathon bars, eyeglasses, sunglasses, wallet...and the hits just keep on coming...

"This life isn't fair; it's gonna get dark, it's gonna get cold. You've gotta get tough, but that ain't enough; it's all about soul..." - Billy Joel, "All About Soul" (1993)

TLC's spin-off to Miami Ink featuring Kat Von D, LA Ink, started this last week. Great program. One of the artists Kat recruited to work her shop - Corey Miller - is an absolute genius...not that the other two artists are that bad in their own right. However, Miller's work is completely original. He did a design on a guy's arm, sketching with a ball-point pen and working forward...then with the tattoo gun. No xerox machines, computer-generation, light tables for this guy, no sir. I marveled as I watched this man work, comparing his craft to the advertising campaign of a local tattoo parlor (touting computerized designs, templates, and the like). In comparison, Miller's work is so soulful - the man's essence was put into the labor.

I couldn't help but think about the similarity between tattooing and coaching. Each person has a background story, a reason for coming to me. I can use the myriad of tools available to everyone (computer programs, books, calculators), but if I don't put my soul into it I'm doing no more than a tracing of someone else's work. All the research, prior workouts, races (both good and bad) and life experience will have gone for naught. In the same vein, an athlete who comes to the track with strong preconceptions of how their training should go (usually based upon something they've read in Runner's World, "Galloway's Great Big Honkin' Book o' Stuff," etc.) usually has missed a big portion of the story.

It's like going to a tattoo artist with a photo of something you've seen on someone and asking for the same d@mned thing.

As the late runner-philosopher/author George Sheehan said, we are all an experiment of one. Taking a cookie-cutter approach to training may - or may not - be effective. Downloading a list of workouts, paces, distances and times can be all well and good, but it's all in a vacuum. While I may write a training plan (in macro) weeks or months in advance, the last two hours leading into the workout are fraught with deep thought: How do I (or my athletes) feel today? What are the weather conditions? Is there a race in the coming weekend? As always, if I had a dollar for every time I've planned a workout and did something completely different once I got to the track, I'd have enough for at least another coaching book...ha, ha, ha...

The training plan, writ large, months in advance may be the heart, but the two hours of thought spent on the couch, walking through the kitchen, and especially the last half-hour during the drive to the track...are the soul of coaching.