Ballin' on a budget

Take a break. Have a coffee, Pal.

This is what I hear every day at work. I have a mighty work ethic, be it training or shovelling iron-making materials into metal bins. I can definitively say I've earned a recovery in training - I've finished out my second tough build week. 12.5 hours this week, and tied for the highest training stress in a week (against my 14 hour week). Today I'm taking the day off completely, then will slowly ease into training. I expect a pretty quick recovery, then it's back for two more weeks of work. Actually, two and a half weeks. I plan on starting some good quality this Thursday. Three days should be enough.

My Friday-Saturday-Sunday were as follows:

Friday
SWIM - 50min - 800m wu (standard 1k minus the 50's), 2x (3x100m on 2min, 2x50m on 2min from blocks, 100m kick easy, 100 swimdown)
RUN - 30min - easy, treadmill run

Saturday
BIKE - 120min - Moderate, hilly ride with a couple hill sprints and some long steady climbs

Sunday
RUN - 45min - easy 10km
SWIM - 45min - 400m warm up (IM stuff), 2x (50fists-50swim-50paddles long slow, low stroke count
50fists-50swim-50paddles hard, try to match stroke count 100 kick), 300m cd w paddles, IM stuff

My last couple days weren't all that high-impact, but I consider it steady, aerobic icing-on-the-cake and done on pretty tired legs. Today I've got that dull, aching pain in the legs. It's a good thing.

This week I'm going to keep working on the swim, but won't do a dedicated hard run until Sunday. On Sunday I will be racing a local 10k to get the second build week started. Thursday I plan on doing some quality riding with the Sault Cycling Club. Always do a bit of running off the bike. Always always always.

Last year I had a personal best 10k time of 35:28. I had paced this poorly as I got over-excited chasing some really fast guys. This Sunday I'm likely going to be in a good position to run my own race so I should be able to see another new PB. In contrast to my last 10km attempt I'm going to start conservatively, something around 3:30-3:32/km for the first 2km. If I'm coming through the first 5km in 17:30 after that, I know all I have to do is sit at that pace. Any extra speed I can find will just put me even further under that 35min mark. Last year the winning time was something like 36, so I'll hopefully have someone around to help me push the pace in the last 5km. Before then I should think about getting a racing singlet or something. I don't want to be that guy in a tri jersey again.

Anyway, I still have a nice chunk of content I'd like to write out but there has been a good amount of current stuff to write about. Maybe the next thing I'll post is something about my summer race schedule. In short, I'm racing the Muskoka 5150 and Toronto Triathlon Festival olympic distance event. These are both AG World Qualifying events.

Adam "Time to roll the legs" Fortais

Quick training update

I lost a couple pounds when I got sick a few weeks back, and I've finally put them back on. Last I checked I'm right on 72kg. In likely related news, I'm really starting to hit my stride with training. Last week took a bit of time to get moving again, but I'm hitting all my times, intensities, volumes, and coming back fresh each day. All this on top of adding 40 hours a week of labour at my new steel mill job. Some specifics...

Starting May 13:

Monday
RUN - 45min - 4x (2 on-1 off-1 on-30 off-30 on-30 off) on = 3:20/km pace, off = easy  running
SWIM - 30 minutes, rotation and catch drills, low cadence 50s (down to 14/length), 100 hard kick for fun

Tuesday
BIKE - 1 hour - steady tempo ride (~230W) and some 1-leg stuff
SWIM - 1 hour - 1km warm up (various things), 4x400m (swim-pull-pull-swim) on 6:45, 7, 7, 6:45 (swims in on 6:10)

Wednesday
BRICK - 75min - Bike (warm up, 2x Maki hill which is about 3km of steady climbing) into run (25 minute tempo at 3:38min/km pace)

Thursday
SWIM - 50min - standard 1km warm up, 3x100m on 2min, 2x50 on 2min all out from blocks, 100easy kick, 100 easy swim, 3x100m on 2 min, 2x50 on 2 min all out from blocks, 100 easy kick cd

Friday
OFF

Saturday
BIKE - 70min - TAG TT
RUN - 100min - Loooong run

Sunday
BIKE - 90min - moderate, hilly ride, unstructured

Monday
BRICK - 100min - Bike (4x6min 5-10% above ftp (300-315W), 4 min rest, 10min 300-315W), Run (30min tempo off bike (3:38min/km))

Tuesday
SWIM - 1 hour - standard 1km warm up, 3x200 on 3:10 (under 3:00), rest, 4x200 w/10 sec rest (swim-pull-swim-pull), swims under 3:00, 100m cool down

Wednesday
BIKE - 80min - 2x20min at ftp (285W), 5 min rest in between

Thursday
SWIM - 75min - 1km warm up, 5x400 with masters team (pull, kick, even 100s sprint, 6th 25 fly, hard for time), 100m cd
BRICK - 2:30 - Bike (long warm up, group ride with Sault Cycling Club, 10km uphill TT, short recovery ride), Run (5x1km between 3:13 and 3:16, 1:30 rest)

It wasn't until about Thursday that I really felt like I was coming into my own. Now, however, I may wake up tired if I had a long day before, but I feel ready by the evening to put in some more good work. I am sticking to my initial plan, but if by the end of the week (I admit, I front-loaded this week) I am still feeling great, I will add more work. Today I am scheduled to only do a swim, however I may add in an easy run or bike later tonight depending on how I feel. My legs are certainly tired from yesterday's great work, but I think I could benefit from a recovery workout.

I have a feeling this great block of training is due in part to getting back to that 72kg mark. I felt like I may have been just slightly under weight for a little while. I'm also back at home in the Sault which makes taking care of myself a little easier. That has got to help. I think the best training tip I can give someone is to let their parents take care of them. Haha...

You may notice that I'm doing a lot of "brick" workouts. I'm happy where my pure running is right now. Now is the time to make sure I can run off the bike. That's what I'm really training for, so I might as well make sure I'm great at that. I've pretty much moved all quality running to the back half of a cycling workout. In scheduling these weeks, I didn't write out any particular brick workouts. I wrote out workouts that would target the energy system I want to exercise, then arranged them... To create the brick workouts I decided what the most important pure cycling workout was and left it alone. Then I coupled bike and run workouts that would stress me in slightly different ways so I could still try and hammer both of them. I matched short, fast intervals on the bike to a tempo run, and a hilly time trial to a VO2Max interval run. In the coming weeks I will be moving even more towards very specific training. I am planning on practising my race-pace and hard, steady riding in my brick workouts and doing my over/under distance intervals in isolated sport workouts. The opposite of what I'm doing now. This transition will happen in the next week or so as one of my big important races is in about 4 weeks.

Here's a picture of me leaving the house in cycling gear to go run:

...my house has surveillance cameras.

Adam "You can never be too safe" Fortais

TAG Time Trial (Race Report 4)

Welp, what more can you do but pace yourself correctly, stay aero and hit a new highest average power for 30ish minutes? I didn't win, and I didn't set a new 20km PB, but I can't help but call this a success.

http://www.sooeveningnews.com/article/20130520/NEWS/130529964

My previous best CP20 test yielded a watt average of 294. I haven't been very focused on cycling lately, but I have been doing an all right amount, so I endeavoured to hold 290W for the 20km time trial (higher by 15W over last year's PB, which was at the very end of the season). The weather was a brisk 12 degrees C with a slight wind. The course was more or less flat with one very small hill at the end and a riser over a highway somewhere near the middle.

I rode around the race area for a couple minutes to shake my legs out before anyone else in the area started warming up, but quickly moved onto my trainer. Typical warm up, do a couple race-pace efforts. Chatted with some Sault Cycling Club members, and just generally relaxed. I felt pretty good and ready to hurt.

I started fairly near the back, 1 minute gaps. I made sure to keep warm and did a couple efforts while waiting. I got up the start ramp and POW, off.

I started the first 2 minutes strong to get up to speed and all that. 320W. This brought me to the first corner where I regrouped and got ready to get into a rhythm. The next 9 minutes I held 293W comfortably hard. It was tough but not stinging-hard, and that brought be to the second corner. I chickened out of my aero bars on this corner and surprise, that's where the event photographer was waiting. SPOTTED - out of the aerobars. Oh well. The next 12 minutes featured a tiny riser, and this probably accounted for my 295W average over this section. Only one turn, took it like a boss but no one was where to see it. The last section was headwind and this is where my pace and rhythm started to suffer. However I still managed to crank out the power. I was suffering at this point, but a new batch of "carrots" started appearing in the last 5 minutes which helped keep the motivation high. With about 500m to go I knew I wasn't going to be cracking the course record, or my PB, but I knew I threw down the best TT I could on the day, and was satisfied.

I ended up coming in at 30:33, averaging 293W. Good enough for second place. I was bested by one Tim Best, with a time of 29:24 or something.

I'm happy with this race, and it has provided a good re-test of my cycling zones. I'm starting to feel it's time for a cycling specific period fairly soon. I'm happy where my run is right now, and I'll never be happy with my swim, but I think I can do some good work on my riding. I can't right now, but after my two A-races I think I'll dedicate a month to solid riding. I'll ride like, a billion kms. I'll ride all the kms.

Adam "All the KIMS" Fortais

(Very late) Race Report 3 - CN Tower Race

Race 3 was up the freakin' CN Tower!

It was a fundraiser for WWF, required a bit of donation money and my family and friends certainly stepped up to the plate on that one. I needed $75 raised to participate but got to $100 almost instantly. Thanks everyone!

So the race was vintage chip-timed, as in, you were given a card which was time-stamped at the bottom, then time stamped at the top.

But wait, let me rewind. This was obviously in Toronto, and it was April 27th. The rules required you to arrive to receive your race kit between 6 am and 10 am. I decided I didn't want to go the day before, so I resolved to just wake up super early and suck it up. That meant waking up at 3:00 am to be on the bus at 3:30 am. Whatever, I survived. I rolled into Toronto at approximately 5:30 am, laced up my shoes and strapped my backpack on nice and good and warm-up jogged to the tower (3 km or so). What I encountered upon approaching the tower was quite surprising.

The line of people leading up to registration was literally* as long as the tower was high! This isn't actually a very interesting story. I'll skip to actually running it.

I have never done this before, so I had no idea what to expect for time. A friend of mine had done 15 minutes, and I saw the World record was just shy of 8 minutes... So I figured I would be somewhere in there. I decided I wanted to shoot for single digits. Under 10 min... I calculated how long it should take to run each floor... but that number was too small to keep myself on pace. I resolved to break it into quarters - 36 flights - 2:30 each. After surfing lines and trying to get ahead of the giant girl guides group or whatever (so they wouldn't hold me up in the tube), I got my card punched and was off!

Pow! Reminiscent of high school track season (we did a lot of early season stair running because many people didn't have snow running gear), I began sprinting up 'dem stairs! ...and I mean sprinting. I got very excited, and was going all out man. I got to flight 30 and realized I was in the red-zone and right on the verge of being toasted. Crap. 114 flights to go. I didn't even check my watch since I knew I blew the race already. There were also a heck of a lot of people in the way. From here on in, I would "jog" up the stairs the best I could, then be forced to walk a flight whilst being stuck behind groups of people walking two-abreast (despite the rules oh so clearly asking you to stay to the right if you will be walking). Regardless, I felt like I had ample ability to go fast. I may have been able to reduce 20 seconds at best if it were an empty tower.

Half way up the tower I was nearly weezing. I don't normally get sore, hurting lungs when I run, but this was certainly the feeling I had. By about 70 flights my ears popped from elevation. I was really suffering. I really underestimated this challenge... However, I kept the countdown going as fast as I could.

With about 10 flights left, it was imminent I would be passing a very tall, strong looking man amidst a horde of specimens of a physically lesser quality. He who would refer to himself as "Coach J" started hollering and clapping. Coach J wanted everyone to know that "this ain't hard!" and that "no matter what your fitness level is, this IS NOT HARD WOOT!" He did this by yelling it non-stop until we reached the top of the tower. He also took the time to make the comment "Toronto's finest! Emergency response. Give it up!" very loud, into the face of one of the volunteer emergency responders. Coach J, I love the enthusiasm. Really, I do. But please please please, some people don't find that kind of reinforcement helpful. In fact, I can imagine someone who could find it derogatory and offensive. I personally don't care, I've got enough self-motivation for everyone. What I really care about is how obnoxious this guy was!

Ways for Coach J to improve:

1) If it's not hard, keep up with me.
2) Keep your clapping arm in your own lane so I don't have to dodge it and get slapped
3) Say thank you to people you would like to thank. Don't shout impersonally compliments into their face.

I'm not mad at Coach J, I liked that he was there because it gave me something to be exasperated about. It's like being held up by the driver so hopelessly trying to back into their space that it becomes funny. Hold on, I'm bad at describing this. Here, this is Coach J:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf4TIWECZ30

So how did I do? Just a hair under 12 minutes. That was good enough for 6th out of about 4000 on the individual climb day, 3rd for the team climb. 8th out of everyone. That's kind of cool! But pretty far from randomly-assigned-goal-pace. Whatever, it was fun!

So uhm... when I got to the top, my lungs had collapsed, felt like they had been clawed by every animal that WWF has ever tried to save, and I tasted blood. Daaaamn. And this lung pain lasted for about a day and a half. I could barely take a full breath and I had wet coughing for about the same amount of time. If anyone knows why I would get this kind of reaction, I would be interested in knowing. I hypothesize that on top of going very anaerobic, maybe the number of people in that tube and elevation change caused me to have a simulated asthma response? Anyone? Bueller?

Adam "The Elevator" Fortais

*Using literally figuratively  

Bike test (and fit), Run test attempt 2, Return to Sault Ste Marie

As alluded to before, I gave myself some time to recover and set out to test my 5km speed again. I did this yesterday in Sault Ste Marie, around my neighbourhood  with my dad biking along side for fun. And it was fun. I went out conservatively, knowing what happened last time. My km splits were 3:25 - 3:21 - 3:20 - 3:20 - 3:11. So two things to glean - super negative splitting... to the point of definitely not hitting the fastest time possible, but also a new PB (16:37). I compared my heart rate data from both days and the story was drastically different. The first attempt had me crawling up to about 190bmp by 7 minutes, then sitting above 192bpm, crawling into 203bpm. I held 6 minutes above 195bpm before blowing up, at about 13 minutes. Yesterday I peaked at about 192bpm around the last km, but held it in the middle 180's for the majority of the run. Perfect. This means I will be updating my training paces a little bit, and I'm starting to figure out quantitatively when to start backing off. Crossing into 192bpm is certainly the redzone.

Insert comical transition. Pause for laughter.

I got a bike fit at Multisport Zone in London on Thursday. My fit seemed... all right I guess, but I knew I could push the saddle forward and I wasn't sure about saddle height. It wasn't uncomfortable per se, but it wasn't great. And I knew I could get a little more aero. So off I went to meet Jeff. Short story even shorter, My seatpost angle was adjusted from 75 degrees to a proper, agressive 78 degrees, my saddle height was lifted by almost 3 inches (!!!!) and I received recommendations to move my armrests back. The armrests were as far back as the two-bold design would allow for, but I have since eschewed the second bolt to try out the waay further back position. Updates on that to follow. The fit feels a lot better, though during testing I was still sucked into riding on the nose of the saddle, likely due to the arm rests being too far up. I attempted my outdoor 30 minute TT but was held up by way too many lights to have a reliable test. Around 90 seconds of waiting for lights, etc... but still received a graded normalized power of 290 watts but actually averaged 280 watts, covering about 19.2km in those 30 minutes. Not bad, but it doesn't really tell me much. I just know it's pretty good. If all goes well I will be racing a 20km TT next weekend in Sault Michigan so I will get a definitive number then.

I'll try and get a picture of my new position for interest-sake and critical purposes.

Speaking of Sault Ste Marie, guess where I am! Sault "covered in snow, no really, it's been blizzarding for 20 hours" Ste Marie. I will be back home working at Essar Steel, in the mill, all summer for good money. But I really don't want to work at all. I'll just have to suck it up though. These race fees ain't gunna pay themselves. Hopefully I'll get a good pile of time off or something and manage to get back to London a couple times.

That's enough for now I think.

Adam "That's enough for now" Fortais

Race season swim test, Specificity and testing protocols

I am fresh out of the pool after my first new swim test and have a bit of extra time so why not another post before I forget some details?

First and foremost, my new swim test is a simple 1000m TT, short course. I completed this in exactly 15:00, or, 1:30/100m. My first 100m was 1:26 and I held that little time gap up until about 700m. I hit 11:13 at 750m and dropped a little further off the pace, but in the last 100m I managed to climb back to that nice, round 15:00. HR tested after completion was 198 BPM. I have no direct comparison, but I do have times from other races this year. I've done 1:33/100m for 1000m long course at the UWO Splash and Dash, and 1:27/100m for 750m at the Queens Spring Fling. Both had enough of a gap between other events that I went all out, and both had competitors in other lanes which helps bring out your A-game. With a completely empty pool and only my brain to keep me motivated, I am satisfied with this time. I'm certainly no Phelps, but I've definitely improved a lot this year and seem to be holding on to those gains despite shifting my focus to overall triathlon fitness as of late. 

Secondly, I believe I've briefly touched on this subject previously but would like to make it emphatically clear why I've changed my testing protocols, and why I chose now to do it. The next two paragraphs contain a large portion of boring personal details. I've underlined the main point I'm trying to get across. I won't be offended if you skip the fluff. 

My understanding of the idea of specificity in training has been somewhat of a roller-coaster ride and perhaps you can identify with me on this. Early on when I first started in sports (and I'm talking baby-Adam) it made complete sense that if you want to be good at something, you have to practice that thing. I want to be good at kicking the ole' soccer ball? I'd best be kicking that soccer ball a lot. I want to be able to beat 3 of my friends at Super Smash Bros. at the same time? I best practice 3-1 matches. I want to beat my neighbour at running 1 lap of my block? I should be running around my block a lot more than him. However when I began taking training more seriously I was introduced to interval training, periodization, and many other fancy training methods. I loved reading about this stuff and would eat up every piece of writing I could get my hands on - perhaps way more than a young, driven, naive boy should have read. I think I was sucked in and overstimulated with ideas about training and began to hyper-focus on new-to-me concepts that seemed to really make sense. In particular, interval training just made sense. If you're stuck at 60 seconds for your 400m (I was an elementary school track-star!) but can only do 28-29 seconds for a 200m, then if you focus on lots of very fast 200m intervals, holding 30sec/200m will be no problem. I became obsessed with fast intervals all through high school to my own peril. I think there were only a handful of times through my entire high school career where I ran more than 9km in one day, or 40km in one week despite claiming to be a XC runner. I suffered from burn out, and hard, by grade 12, never having a truly successful year of racing. 

Fast-forward to now. I've matured a lot, and completely changed my training. Yes, I still feel drawn to short, fast intervals but I've severely curbed my addiction to overspeed training. I consistently run long and slow, I worry about weekly volume, and I'm faster than I ever thought possible. I attribute the difference to a number of things, but the number one improvement is specificity of training. No longer do I focus on 200-400m intervals while eschewing the tempo runs and long, slow days. In fact, I may have done 3 or 4 workouts this year that included speed work like that. I've realized that the stress it provides is too great for the return on fitness in most cases, and the returns I do get may not be beneficial for my goal races. This year I will be making the jump from sprint to olympic distance triathlon. I will be increasing race duration from 1 hour to 2 hours. I will have to run after 1 hour of cycling, not just 30 minutes. My current 10km PB is 35:28, and my current 10km PB off the bike does not exist. Now, if I were to worry about anything running related, would it be that I don't have enough top-end speed this year, or that I need to work on my threshold and running strength to be able to run well off the bike? (It's the second one.)

Thesis: Think about what the goal of your training is and focus on the things that hold you back.

This relates to my choice of testing protocol throughout the year. In the early season, far out from races, I thought about my fitness, selected aspects of my fitness that I believed were holding me back or would allow for greater improvement this race season. In swimming I could hold a pace fairly close to my maximum 100m time for a good length of time, but that 100m time was pretty pathetic (1:27). Cycling, it was threshold endurance. In running... well, I pretty much just wanted to hit my peak fitness from last year at the same time as swimming and biking were hitting their peaks. If I can maintain that fitness and bring the other two events up I would be in a good place. So for swimming I knew the main energy pathway I would be using during an olympic race is that threshold area, that "comfortably un-comfortable" region you probably know and love. This means that the majority of my training should be targeted at improving my speed at that effort level. Specificity tells me I should train at that level to be better at that level. However, a whole year of focusing right at that level would suck a lot and in the long run probably not get me the results I would like. So in the base seasons I take one step back and take the same approach as before but rather than think about what is holding me back in my race, think what is holding me back in training at that level. Base is the perfect time to work on these supplementary skills and effort levels. So I recognized that technique was holding me back, and short, max speed fitness was holding me back. Therefore I allowed my training to target these things - I had my stroke analysed, worked on a lot of drills, and worked on bringing my 100m time down with short intervals. Now, during this phase as with any other, you had better find a way to measure your progress. Hopefully you can guess where this is going. If I'm training my short interval speed and my technique specifically, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have a test set which tests my threshold fitness. I need one that focuses on short intervals and technique if possible. 

With this in mind and a little help from my friend Theo, I designed the short test set described in an earlier post. 50m on 45 seconds, coming in at any time I'd like, until I can't make the pace time any more. I know, not a pure speed test set, but straddling the line between endurance and speed, with an emphasis on speed. I knew I was making progress because my results increased from 6 to 10 throughout the winter. Additionally, in workouts I noticed my 100m time dropping significantly... My 100m PB was once 1:27, but within a workout I've hit 1:17.

Fantastic. But now the Base period is over. Summer is upon us and I'm but a month and a bit out from my first important race. The focus has switched from training the supplemental skills that will allow me to train at the most important effort levels, to training those specific effort levels I will be using in a race. My swim focus has moved from a fast 100m to a fast 1500m swim split, so I am starting to train like it. But as I've said above, you have to be able to measure your progress (or lack thereof). And so alas! We arrive at the conclusion. :.  QED. I care about my threshold speed, so I will test my threshold speed. 1000m TT. Very similar to a 1500m swim split, but toned down to reduce the stress and fatigue after doing it (I do these on my rest week, I ought to be resting). I am also switching my bike test to 30minutes max power outdoors, and my run test to a 5km TT. 

Adam "Makes sense to me at least..." Fortais