I had decided a couple weeks ago that my next long swim training session would concentrate on getting better with breathing from the unfavored side. After having made good progress on the two beat kick and overall form with the total immersion techniques, it was about time I get more comfortable breathing from both sides. Last time I had done any degree of breathing from the other side, I could tell my form was very unbalanced - most noticably because my right leg would make a big splash during a kick.
My initial goal was to do an entire lap breathing from the opposite side. So, thats what I started out doing. A few minutes in, I noticed I was starting to get the hang of it a bit more - the kick from my right leg was less water-disruptive, and although the motions themselves were still herky-jerky, it was a noticable improvement from before. However, I was still only going 5-10 breaths before having to stop for sighting, and in general just catching my breath.
About halfway through, I decided to start bilateral breathing. Since I'm much more comfortable breathing on one side, perhaps that would help normalize things and actually end up bringing overall efficiency up. The problem I had in the past with bilateral breathing was that I didn't have the aerobic capacity to keep it up.
So today's attempt at bilateral breathing was a surprise, initially. I was able to keep up the rhythm for a more extended period of time! I still had to stop every 50 yards or so - but apparently the improvements in form with breathing from the 'bad' side were enough to allow me to do the 50 yds, which is more than I could do before.
As a result, the last 1/4 mile (half the total distance) were basically in 50 yd sections of bilateral breathing. As a bonus, every time I stopped, I found I was tracking pretty straight in the water - no more swimming like a drunken manatee!
I stopped a bit short of the other shore because I had a good 15 minutes or so of dramatically improved form practice, and I didn't want to tire and let it get sloppy. At this point, I'm more concerned with ingraining good form into the muscle memory than I am about building distance or speed.
Total Distance: ~0.5 miles
Total Time: 25:37
Avg HR: 157
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
5.25 mile run - 9/9
Today I received the Patt Strap in the mail, and was excited to give it a shot. The Patt Strap is a knee compression strap which appears to help a lot of people with IT band issues. For $20, it was worth a shot.
Once again, I got to the 20 minute (or so) mark before feeling the IT band. This was a disappointment, as this was the distance I had gone the other day before feeling irritation without the Patt Strap. So either the strap did nothing for me, or I was not using it in a way that was helping me.
I continued with the run, doing 4 minutes of running with 30 seconds of stretching. The idea from this comes from the Galloway run-walk-run, except I modified it to be a stretch break instead of a walk break.
This seemed to help quite a bit. Although I could still feel the irritation building up to the 4 minute mark when I would stretch things out, it was enough to allow me to finish the 5+ miles.
Total Distance: 5.25 miles
Total Time: 47:12
Avg HR: 159
Once again, I got to the 20 minute (or so) mark before feeling the IT band. This was a disappointment, as this was the distance I had gone the other day before feeling irritation without the Patt Strap. So either the strap did nothing for me, or I was not using it in a way that was helping me.
I continued with the run, doing 4 minutes of running with 30 seconds of stretching. The idea from this comes from the Galloway run-walk-run, except I modified it to be a stretch break instead of a walk break.
This seemed to help quite a bit. Although I could still feel the irritation building up to the 4 minute mark when I would stretch things out, it was enough to allow me to finish the 5+ miles.
Total Distance: 5.25 miles
Total Time: 47:12
Avg HR: 159
Monday, September 7, 2009
4.2 miles run - 9/7
Following last week's 6 mile run with the persistant IT band irritation, it has been a week since I've run. At this point, it is obvious that the IT band situation is not going away quickly, so this run was just to see where the irritation would start appearing.
During todays run, I got to about the 20 minute point before starting to feel minor irritation from the IT band. So instead of stopping, which I've done in the past, I decided to take a stretch break to see if it would help. It did, but I found that I could only go a couple more minutes before irritation would set in again. I ended up finishing the run out with 2 sessions of 7 minutes (with stretch breaks). So while it was a disappointment that the stretching didn't have a long lasting effect, at least it helped a bit.
Total Distance: 4.2 miles
Total Time: 38:40
Avg HR: 161
During todays run, I got to about the 20 minute point before starting to feel minor irritation from the IT band. So instead of stopping, which I've done in the past, I decided to take a stretch break to see if it would help. It did, but I found that I could only go a couple more minutes before irritation would set in again. I ended up finishing the run out with 2 sessions of 7 minutes (with stretch breaks). So while it was a disappointment that the stretching didn't have a long lasting effect, at least it helped a bit.
Total Distance: 4.2 miles
Total Time: 38:40
Avg HR: 161
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Cranberry Country Olympic Tri - 8/31
I was a bit nervous in the days leading up to my first olympic tri, primarily because I haven't done much in the way of training for the past month due to IT band soreness. This would also be my first competition using my new total immersion swimming style (in which I have generally been poor at sighting and swimming straight), and I haven't done much cycling at all this year.
So, in the end - I decided that the main goal would simply be to see what its like to do a race that is fully 2x the distance of a sprint. Though not too awful concerned about time, I figured I'd end up around 3 hours - about 40 minutes for the swim, an 80-90 minutes for the bike, and the remaining 50-60 minutes for the run.
This particular tri was also the USAT regional championship, which meant there was a good deal of competition. That was another reason why my goal wasn't oriented around finishing within a certain percentile of my age group - because I was probably going to be disappointed if I did.
The swim portion went pretty well for what I was looking to do - maintain form throughout, and not exert myself too much. I had intended to do some bilateral breathing for practice, but I ended up skipping it. I haven't practiced the bilateral breathing enough yet to be proficient, and as it was I knew right away I was going to be relatively slow in this portion of the event.
About 1/4 of the way through, I noticed that someone else was swimming the entire portion backwards. He was off to my side - about 10 feet away - and he was doing a lazy backstroke. Except I can't really call it lazy when I was only barely able to keep up with him when I was doing freestyle.
Around the 2/3 mile mark, I noticed that I was being passed by a few people. During one of my quick breaks for sighting, I looked back and saw the wave of swimmers who started 5 minutes after my wave - they caught up to me!
Exiting the water, I saw only one other person in my wave exiting around the same time. I think we were the last blue cap swimmers out of the water. In the end, though - the primary take-away from the swim is that I have to balance better. I found I still keep my head up too much, so I'll be needing to work on that.
The transition to the bike went much better this time than it did during the Webster Lake Tri. I definately had more energy coming out of the water, which was a good sign. Plus, this didn't require a 1/4 mile barefoot run to T1.
The bike portion was probably the most comfortable portion of the whole event - but I didn't know by how much at the time. The swimming gets boring, and I knew I was going to have IT band issues during the run. The bike route was relatively flat - a few rolling hills. Knowing the distance for the bike was quite a bit longer, and that I'd have 6 miles of running afterwards - I kept at what felt like an even steady effort. At one point, I was watching another rider, and saw that her cadence was much higher than everyone elses. After having done some cadence work with running, it seemed she was much closer to the ideal cadence of 90 that most cyclists try to achieve. From that point on, I decided to be more active in shifting so that I could maintain a similar cadence. I found that this allowed me to have more energy going up the hills, and helped conserve energy overall. This was a good lesson to have learned - but it also highlighted the inefficiencies when the gear shifters are on the front of the frame as opposed to on the handlebars.
Once the bike was finished, I was curious to know how long I could go before feeling the IT band. I had been hoping that it would be around 4 miles - at least as long as I'd been able to run before, plus a bit extra because of the couple days rest. I was also hoping that running 4 minutes followed by walking 30 seconds would really extend the time, and maybe - just maybe I wouldn't have a problem. In reality, it wasn't 4 miles before I felt it, more like 40 yds. Almost right away I could tell that there were going to be problems. For the first 1.5-2 miles, as it started getting more and more uncomfortable, I kept rolling over in my head how to handle it. I thought maybe I should stop all together and prevent further injury. I thought that maybe I could just suffer through it and deal with whatever ramifications that would have. Maybe I should take more walk breaks.
Then, I had a bit of an epiphany. I noticed that when my foot hit the ground, it felt as though my foot wanted to keep moving forward inside my sneaker. In other words, my sneakers were acting like breaks and preventing momentum from carrying me forward. I elongated my stride a bit, and concentrated on landing more on the balls of my feet. Shockingly, the IT band almost nearly stopped complaining! My calves started whining a bit more - but they are muscle, and so they could just deal with it, as far as I was concerned. Not only did it feel better, but I sped up a bit too. I could tell because there was someone who was passing my during my walk breaks, but during the 4 minute runs I was passing him. Once my stride got longer, I passed him and never saw him again.
Unfortunately, that wasn't a cure-all, as the IT band still started complaining again. But the combination of walk breaks, landing on the balls of my feet, and having a stride long enough that my sneakers weren't effectively putting on the breaks was what allowed me to finish.
Total Time: 2:59:12
Avg HR: 163
Swim Time: 36:09
Swim Avg HR: 165
T1: 4:34
Bike Time: 1:21:04
Bike Avg HR: 159
T2: 2:00
Run Time: 54:59
Run Avg HR: 167
So, in the end - I decided that the main goal would simply be to see what its like to do a race that is fully 2x the distance of a sprint. Though not too awful concerned about time, I figured I'd end up around 3 hours - about 40 minutes for the swim, an 80-90 minutes for the bike, and the remaining 50-60 minutes for the run.
This particular tri was also the USAT regional championship, which meant there was a good deal of competition. That was another reason why my goal wasn't oriented around finishing within a certain percentile of my age group - because I was probably going to be disappointed if I did.
The swim portion went pretty well for what I was looking to do - maintain form throughout, and not exert myself too much. I had intended to do some bilateral breathing for practice, but I ended up skipping it. I haven't practiced the bilateral breathing enough yet to be proficient, and as it was I knew right away I was going to be relatively slow in this portion of the event.
About 1/4 of the way through, I noticed that someone else was swimming the entire portion backwards. He was off to my side - about 10 feet away - and he was doing a lazy backstroke. Except I can't really call it lazy when I was only barely able to keep up with him when I was doing freestyle.
Around the 2/3 mile mark, I noticed that I was being passed by a few people. During one of my quick breaks for sighting, I looked back and saw the wave of swimmers who started 5 minutes after my wave - they caught up to me!
Exiting the water, I saw only one other person in my wave exiting around the same time. I think we were the last blue cap swimmers out of the water. In the end, though - the primary take-away from the swim is that I have to balance better. I found I still keep my head up too much, so I'll be needing to work on that.
The transition to the bike went much better this time than it did during the Webster Lake Tri. I definately had more energy coming out of the water, which was a good sign. Plus, this didn't require a 1/4 mile barefoot run to T1.
The bike portion was probably the most comfortable portion of the whole event - but I didn't know by how much at the time. The swimming gets boring, and I knew I was going to have IT band issues during the run. The bike route was relatively flat - a few rolling hills. Knowing the distance for the bike was quite a bit longer, and that I'd have 6 miles of running afterwards - I kept at what felt like an even steady effort. At one point, I was watching another rider, and saw that her cadence was much higher than everyone elses. After having done some cadence work with running, it seemed she was much closer to the ideal cadence of 90 that most cyclists try to achieve. From that point on, I decided to be more active in shifting so that I could maintain a similar cadence. I found that this allowed me to have more energy going up the hills, and helped conserve energy overall. This was a good lesson to have learned - but it also highlighted the inefficiencies when the gear shifters are on the front of the frame as opposed to on the handlebars.
Once the bike was finished, I was curious to know how long I could go before feeling the IT band. I had been hoping that it would be around 4 miles - at least as long as I'd been able to run before, plus a bit extra because of the couple days rest. I was also hoping that running 4 minutes followed by walking 30 seconds would really extend the time, and maybe - just maybe I wouldn't have a problem. In reality, it wasn't 4 miles before I felt it, more like 40 yds. Almost right away I could tell that there were going to be problems. For the first 1.5-2 miles, as it started getting more and more uncomfortable, I kept rolling over in my head how to handle it. I thought maybe I should stop all together and prevent further injury. I thought that maybe I could just suffer through it and deal with whatever ramifications that would have. Maybe I should take more walk breaks.
Then, I had a bit of an epiphany. I noticed that when my foot hit the ground, it felt as though my foot wanted to keep moving forward inside my sneaker. In other words, my sneakers were acting like breaks and preventing momentum from carrying me forward. I elongated my stride a bit, and concentrated on landing more on the balls of my feet. Shockingly, the IT band almost nearly stopped complaining! My calves started whining a bit more - but they are muscle, and so they could just deal with it, as far as I was concerned. Not only did it feel better, but I sped up a bit too. I could tell because there was someone who was passing my during my walk breaks, but during the 4 minute runs I was passing him. Once my stride got longer, I passed him and never saw him again.
Unfortunately, that wasn't a cure-all, as the IT band still started complaining again. But the combination of walk breaks, landing on the balls of my feet, and having a stride long enough that my sneakers weren't effectively putting on the breaks was what allowed me to finish.
Total Time: 2:59:12
Avg HR: 163
Swim Time: 36:09
Swim Avg HR: 165
T1: 4:34
Bike Time: 1:21:04
Bike Avg HR: 159
T2: 2:00
Run Time: 54:59
Run Avg HR: 167
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