Last week was a fairly solid week of training. With 3 runs and swims, 2 Gym sessions and 4 rides. My ride sessions included my only dry land hard efforts for the week. They were held on Tuesday and Thursday. I told you about Tuesday’s efforts last week. Thursday involved 4 x 7 minute efforts aiming to be working at 102- 120%of my Threshold power which is currently 290 watts. I hit all the intervals well with the last I let go a bit and went a bit harder and actually averaged more power than I had for the previous 3.
My Swims seem to be going ok. Nothing spectacular but solid enough. In the 3 swims the majority was Aerobic paced swimming with 2 sessions having some hard work in them. The first one had 6 x 200 meters hard and the other had 6 x 50 meters fast. With lots aerobic intensity before and after them.
My run was again filled with all aerobic paced running. Except for Tuesday this week where I completed a 20 minute performance test. Of the other runs last week 2 were on a treadmill where I was finally able to get some running in while holding my heart rate in my Zone 2 intensity level. Saturday morning was a 1:50:00 run out doors. This was a fairly frustrating run as even though my pace was abysmally slow. My heart rate would not stay inside my Zone 2 training zones and I ended up doing a lot more walking than I wanted. I am committed to this cause, so it is no use after one run saying fuck it. Lets go back to what I have always done. The reality though was that it was bloody hot and humid even at 5:30 am in the morning. It was the first time I had gone long in those conditions for a long time.
Come to Tuesday when I had the first of 3 progress tests or starting points if you will. Tuesday was slated for a Run test. I’ll be honest it was meant to be a 5 km run effort but I was over heating badly and I was not feeling well at all. So I made the executive decision or Pussied out, which ever way you want to call it. But it’s ok. You can’t lump shit on me enough to how I feel about that run any way. I mean for fuck sake. 5 km at a decent effort level. Nope my fucked up run mechanics are so bad that, I can’t even make that happen. I am really quite pissed at this. After 5 years of pretty consistent running I honestly don’t think I am much better than I was after 18 months. In fact I can honestly say I am performing worse that I was in 2018. Anyway as you see below. In my now 20 minute effort I managed a earth shattering 5:03 m/km pace and ended up with an average heart rate of 149 BPM for 20 minutes.
I mean I realise that it is a starting point and I have to be patient. But fuck it all I just want to see a little bit of improvement or maybe even feel a little better on the run. But nope. Neither for this little red duck. I know the facts. I’ve read the studies and listened to enough podcasts to know that when you change your run gait you will feel like crap for a while and even be slower than before. But I honestly don’t give a shit right now. I need a carrot dangled to show me something of what I am doing is working.
.
On Thursday I have a swim test. Which will be a 1 km TT in the pool and on Friday I will be doing a 2 Bike tests. 1 will be an aerobic ramp test and the other will be a 20 minute test.
The first of the bike tests to me at the moment is the important one for most of my rides. This will be where I will finetune my aerobic base riding a little more. What that entails is where I start on a stationary trainer going easy and every 2 minutes I will raise the power up by 20 watts. What I am looking for on this test is when my heart rate starts to rise in a non linear way. This should signify where I reach a point where my body starts to feel that the intensity is at a range where it has gone from working easy to a moderate level. Once I reach the required level I will drop the power done to find the range that I will be aiming to hit for the next 4 - 6 weeks during the majority of my riding.
The 20 minute Time trial effort is a pretty standard test where i will take the average power over the 20 minutes and take about 8% from it and will call that my threshold power. From this number my hard sessions on Tuesdays will b based around this number which is know as Functional Threshold Power (FTP).
It is really hard not to change my running up right now. I will be super honest with you. Every part of me feels that I need to start putting in run intervals and doing some faster work to try lift my pace up. But I won’t. I logically know that right now the level of efficiency I have on the run is partly because of the lack of aerobic efficiency I have on the run. My long run on Saturday proved that when after 25 minutes I had all sorts of trouble keeping my heart rate in my current Zone 2 or easy pace. I can see a lot of treadmill work in my imminent future. I it were I can better control speed and intensity. It is not pretty it is not fun. But it will hopefully bring better results.
This week I am holding off on any heavy lifting as I want to keep my legs that little bit fresher to give it a red hot go for the remainder of the tests. But I am still doing my main rehab exercises and core routine every day.
The one thing I will say though is that the signs are trending for the better for my over all health and hopefully long term training adaptation possibilities. You see, my heart is now responding in hard efforts as it should be. Last year looking back the complete lack of heart rate fluctuations during hard work were a definitive sign to long term over reaching and centralised fatigue. The photo below was a 25 minute hard effort. Not too impressive by it self. But when you put in the fact that I had already done a 5:28:00 bike ride with Ironman and 70.3 pace efforts and that 25 minutes was at the back end of a 2 hour run off the bike. At that pace my heart rate should have been steadily climbing due to glycogen depletion and dehydration of the days endeavours. This weekend was 4 weeks before Ironman Cairns. So I was really, really fit. Possibly the fittest I have ever been. But at those paces were at that stage in the day there is no way I was running purely aerobically, there should have been significant heart rate drift. With what I know now know I was likely in a state of centralised fatigue or Functionally over reaching and because of that my body was so busy trying to recover from what I was putting it through, that even when I went hard my parasympathetic nervous system kept my heart rate as low as it could to prevent me from getting my heart rate up any higher. You see at that stage. when your body is under so much accumulated load your autonomic nervous system is doing it’s absolute best to keep you going. In that state you need recovery and because it wasn’t getting enough the sympathetic nervous system was actually getting over ridden to stop me from actually revving the engine significantly.
That got a bit sciencey there I do apologise. Not really.
Until next week.
Mick