training

Stress overload can drail even the fittest athlete. 

Last Sunday was the annual Haleiwa Metric Century Ride, hosted as always by the Hawaii Bicycling League. The ride begins at Kaiaka Bay Park in Haleiwa and passes several iconic surfing spots, including Waimea Bay and Sunset Beach. It’s place on the calendar make it a perfect shake-down for anyone doing Ironman 70.3 Hawaii, aka Honu, and there was a bunch of us doing just that. 

I am pleased to announce my Spring Into Action promotion, a great deal for new members. I am fortunate to live in Hawaii, where I can swim, bike, and run outdoors year-round, but I am not looking to build an in-person squad. We have enough of those here. 

I am looking for athletes who have been doing triathlon for a year or more and just need a little help with managing the process. I specialize in seniors and coach primarily on-line, but have limited availability for in-person coaching in Honolulu. 

It is no secret that sugar is the most effective fuel for endurance training. But are they the best? Some people disagree.

I am a fan of eating everything. I am not going down the rabbit hole of high carb, high fat, vegan, organic, gluten free fads that persist in adding confusion around what fuel is best for athletes. What I am dealing with here is sugar. Specifically, the confusing, even contradictory messaging about endurance athletes and the sugar intake.

If you read my last post on routine - if not, go and read it now - you might have decided to have your early season strength and conditioning sessions on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon. You may encounter a few hiccups at first; forgotten gym bag, stuck in traffic, a vet appointment you made six months ago. Eventually things smoothout and you put in a solid couple of weeks, but then more problems crop up. Things keep getting in the way. Maybe you get home and realize it’s Wednesday and you are supposed to be at the gym. 

The previous post was about skills. Key to improving skills is adequate flexibility. With flexibility, more is not always better. What you need  is just enough. This is particularly true with running, where too much flexibility will result in a loss of economy and can increase the chance of injury. When we don’t devote time to flex work, when all we do is swim, bike, and run, our muscles adapt to a limited range of motion. Eventually, this will cause trouble in the knees, hips, shoulders, lower back … just about any joint except maybe your nose.

If you are like me you are experiencing an explosion of AI promotions offering to write your Emails, fix your photos, and just about everything else short of washing your windows. For athletes, this includes coaching services.

The training process is not complicated. Apply some stress to your body and later on, while you are asleep, your body will respond in ways that make you faster and more powerful. The same activity trains your brain to perform the necessary movements as efficiently as possible. 

As a general rule I do not advocate epic training days. There is clearly a tradition of bragging rites, in cycling and triathlon and perhaps even swimming, concerning eight hour bike rides and twenty mile runs, and similar feats of endurance. Then there is research that shows a peak cost/benefit at three to four hours on the bike, and one and a half to two hours of running, beyond which the training effect declines while the risk of injury increases.

In our casual thoughts and conversations we often use words without being overly specific as to their meaning. Consider the words motivation and commitment. How should we apply these to our athletic training? Do they mean the same thing in other situations?

Motivation

Motivation is a force or stimulus that encourages us to act. Picture yourself sitting in your favorite chair, all happy and comfortable. Then, along comes thirst. You find the energy to pause the movie you are watching, get up, walk to the refrigerator and grab a cold beer.