His post can be read here.

In fact, the latest science suggests that “extremely loose muscles and tendons are generally unnecessary (unless you aspire to join a gymnastics squad), may be undesirable and are, for the most part, unachievable, anyway.”

Do you agree or disagree? The full article can be read here.

=================

THE talk, at the Expo Center at the Boston Marathon this year, had an intriguing title: Using Biomechanics to Predict Running Injuries. And the lecturer, Dr. Thomas W. Vorderer, a podiatrist at the division of sports medicine at Children’s Hospital, one of the Harvard hospitals, spoke with great conviction.

You can prevent injuries, Dr. Vorderer said, or, if you get them, can make them heal if you learn the right way to stretch and if you stretch regularly. And you should also learn the right way to run; in general, he said, runners should strike the ground with their heels first. If they strike with their midfoot or forefoot, he said, they are just asking for injuries.

Dr. Vorderer speaks from experience: he was a competitive runner for years and said he trained with fantastic coaches. And he says he has helped countless runners rid themselves of chronic injuries by figuring out why they were getting injured and teaching them, for example, the right way to stretch. He has e-mail messages from grateful patients, thanking him for solving problems that threatened to end their running altogether.

But exercise physiologists say none of what he espouses has been established by rigorous studies. Stretching evidence is so inconclusive that two large studies are now under way that randomize people to stretch or not and ask whether it prevents injuries, does nothing or increases injury rates. No one knows what the answer will be.

As for running styles, a credible study in 2007 showed that running form often depended on running speed. The slower people run, the study found, the more likely they are to strike the ground with their heel first. The same runners, going more slowly, run differently from when they run fast.

There is no right or wrong way to run, said Peter R. Cavanagh, a professor in the department of orthopedics and sports medicine at the University of Washington. And even if there is, he said, it is not clear that people can permanently change their natural stride.

Dr. Vorderer says that he knows experts often disagree but that the art of sports medicine is to understand individuals.

“It’s hard,” he said. “Anyone can put out a shingle and say, ‘I’m a sports medicine doctor.’ You basically want to go where you have to wait an hour in the office. Then you know it’s a busy office.” And, he adds, while it is easy to diagnose a problem like an Achilles tendon injury, what you really want to know is, “Why do I have this? What mechanical or structural or shoe problem gave it to me?”

So how are athletes supposed to know whom or what to believe? It’s a huge problem, researchers say. They have some tips, but their overall message is: Be wary and be careful. Look for credentials and rigorous science. And check the Web sites of reputable organizations, like the American College of Sports Medicine, which publishes position papers on exercise science. The papers are compiled by committees of experts and provide references and evidence to support their statements.

Yet bad advice is so ubiquitous that almost everyone, even experts themselves, has been foiled.

That happened, for example, to Dr. Paul Thompson of Hartford Hospital, a heart researcher and marathon runner. He warns that people should “be careful of advice that has a price tag.” The best example, he said, are orthotics, those shoe inserts that are supposed to prevent injuries.

“Podiatrists make money making them, and more power to them,” Dr. Thompson said. “But some podiatrists think they cure everything.”

“I once needed orthotics,” he continued. “The podiatrist wanted me to run with them. It completely changed my foot plant and produced lateral knee pain, which resolved when I used them only with my walking shoes.”

Something similar happened to me. After I got a stress fracture in a small bone in my foot last year, my orthopedist prescribed orthotics. For weeks I tried to run with them but felt slow, like I was running through sand. Then I pulled my hamstring. My coach watched me run with and without the orthotics and said he could see why I was having problems: the orthotics changed my foot plant so I was braking with every step. Now, like Dr. Thompson, I wear them only when I walk around.

Those of us who are not experts can be especially vulnerable to bad advice. After my stress fracture, I had a biomechanical analysis by an exercise physiologist at a commercial studio in New York. Among other things, I was told to change the way I run. My heels never hit the ground; I had to learn to run so my heels struck first.

I knew I couldn’t do that, so I ignored the advice and never returned to those experts. But my friend Birgit Unfried tried to listen to a sports medicine doctor in New Jersey who analyzed her running stride. She had a painful iliotibial band, which stabilizes the knee, and was plagued with shin splints. The reason, she was told, was that her stride was wrong. She was a heel striker; she needed to learn to strike first with her midfoot.

BIRGIT tried and did so well that her doctor put before and after videos of her running on his Web site. But she never felt comfortable running that new way. As for her injuries, the new gait was no panacea. At first, Birgit said, her problems seemed to go away. But soon she pulled her quadriceps muscle and, despite her changed gait, her shin splints came back worse than ever.

“I haven’t been running at all,” Birgit said. “At times I think I’m getting better but then I touch my shin in certain areas, like down near the ankle, and it hurts like a bruise.”

Orthotics and running styles are the easier cases. All too often, there are no studies or scientific evidence to guide anyone, even the experts. When studies are done, they tend to be inadequate.

“Good experiments need tight experimental design, and they need control groups,” Dr. Cavanagh said. Without them, results are pretty much useless. And many exercise studies lack one or both of those crucial elements.

That may not matter to many who dispense advice. Often, they rely on a hunch or personal experience or on what they think makes a great athlete great.

Take pedal speed in cycling, said Michael J. Berry, a serious road cyclist and chairman of the department of health and exercise science at Wake Forest University. The studies, such as they are, say the best pedal speed is 60 to 80 revolutions a minute. But that is based on experiments with untrained subjects riding stationary bikes in an exercise lab. Those results may have no relevance for experienced cyclists riding on roads.

So, ignoring those lab studies, many experts counsel cyclists to pedal much faster. Their evidence? It’s Lance Armstrong, who pedals extraordinarily fast — 95, 100, 110 r.p.m.’s.

In the 2003 Tour de France, Armstrong consistently beat his rival, Jan Ullrich, and commentators, Dr. Berry noted, said it was in part because he could pedal so fast. Ullrich pedals slower but uses bigger gears. “What if Lance had never been there and Jan had won?” Dr. Berry said. “Would people say that the reason he is so good is that he pushes a big gear?”

================

IF anyone ever wondered whether it was talent or sustained systematic training that makes athletes so good, they need only look at Joshua Gordon, a professional mediator in Boston.

Mr. Gordon ran cross-country in college before stopping completely to take up baseball. Six years later, in 1999, he decided, almost as a lark, to run the Boston Marathon. He joined a program to learn how to run longer distances, a process that involved gradually increasing the length of his runs and focusing only on distance, not speed.

He finished the marathon in a little over four hours, not especially fast for a man of 24, but he did meet his goal. “I was thrilled,” he said.

And so he found himself edging back into running, entering shorter races, 5 and 10 kilometers. He tried to train on his own, but he never did particularly well until he decided to start serious, rigorous marathon training with the Boston Athletic Association. He received coached track workouts once a week, four to six coached runs of 18 to 23 miles along the marathon course, and he had a group of skilled and talented athletes to run with.

Continue reading…

=========

Building muscle and strength doesn’t require a gym membership, or even weights, according to a new study from the University of Texas-El Paso. In a new test of manual resistance exercises, where a training partner provided the resistance, researchers found the strength training to be just as effective as using weights.

During a 14-week period, the scientists monitored 84 college students who were assigned to either a traditional program of weights-based exercises, or manual resistance workouts. Both groups were given six exercises and performed eight to 12-rep sets two to four times. By the end of the study, the two groups showed no significant differences in strength development.

Continue reading…

===============

WELDON JOHNSON first tried caffeine as a performance enhancer in 1998. He was not a coffee drinker but had heard that caffeine could make him run faster. So he went to a convenience store before a race and drank a cup of coffee.

For the first time in his life, he ran 10 kilometers in less than 30 minutes.

“I remember being really wired before the race,” he said in an e-mail message. “My body was shaking.”

From then on, he was a convert.

Mr. Johnson, a founder of LetsRun.com, would avoid caffeine, even in soft drinks, for a few weeks before he competed in a race, wanting to have the full stimulant effect.

“It may have been a huge placebo effect, but I swore by it,” Mr. Johnson said. “Having a cup of coffee exactly one hour before the race was part of my routine.”

Or maybe it was not a placebo effect.

Caffeine, it turns out, actually works. And it is legal, one of the few performance enhancers that is not banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Continue reading…

Note: this interview was originally published on the Flotrack website and is reproduced here with permission from Chris. 

=============================

(c) Copyright – 2009 – Christopher Kelsall

Keith Livingstone, from New Zealand recently published a new book about an old training method, writing it in today’s language. He has taken the famous training method of the late and incomparable Arthur Lydiard and modernized it so everyone can understand the theory and application fully in a book he calls, Healthy Intelligent Training or H.I.T for short.

The Lydiard method may have produced dozens of international medals for New Zealand, Finland and several other countries, the method also is the training practise of many times that number of runners who wish to experience personal bests or want to run faster in their age-group or race well regionally, nationally, internationally or at the very top of the running echelon. People were drawn to the unique character of Arthur Lydiard, below Keith explains why.

Keith Livingstone grew up very near Lydiard in Auckland, New Zealand. He later ran for the Owairaka Running Club founded by Lydiard. Livingstone went on to run well nationally with a 10, 000m personal best 29:19 and 5000m 14:04. He has been quietly coaching international athletes for the past 20 years, including the coach of an Olympic triathlon gold medallist.

Lorraine Moller, four time Olympian and Olympic bronze marathon winner wrote: ‘Keith captures the genius of Lydiard and delivers it to athletes and coaches in a comprehensive and complete  form….the Lydiard Foundation has adopted this book as it’s official text for all Lydiard coaching courses.’ 

The interview

CK: You have recently produced a book, which is now available for purchase called Healthy Intelligent Training. The book informs readers about the Arthur Lydiard method of training, but in the language of today.

The Lydiard method is many things, but one particular aspect I like is the simplicity of it. Did you have trouble keeping today’s terminology from clouding the basic message of the Lydiard method?

KL: No and yes!

No, because I have made a point of trawling the exercise physiology literature in the last 25 years to understand what the requirements of superb performance are – and I haven’t limited myself to just running literature. It’s a big hobby, so I’m not like a PhD candidate who has to know more and more about less and less. I’m free to find out more and more about more and more. Like a kangaroo compared to a blinkered cart-horse; able to hop all over the place having a look at whatever.

I’m interested in strength training, neuromuscular training, brain training, martial arts, the training of power and balance…boxing, swimming, cycling, kayaking, the whole box and dice. And I have a clear rationale or understanding in my own mind now (I think!) of the general physiology, and it all comes down to a simple understanding of the different muscle fibre types, and their respective dominant energy systems and nerve types, and the effective limits on those systems, and how best to train these muscle fibres and systems. Easy to describe when you say it quickly, but it took a long time to distil my understanding of the “simplicity” of all of this into cartoon format.

My brother Colin is a fabulous cartoonist and he ripped the guts out of what I was trying to get across in simple diagram form, so that by the end of the physiology section, a 12 year old could tell you what all these things represent. And by the time I went through the process of clarifying my thoughts for the purpose of the book, I realized that no one has really explained the muscle fibre types in a manner that anyone from off the street can understand. No book that I’ve read, anyhow. They write about these systems in an “assumed understood” manner, or circle around them, but at the end of this whole process I am pretty certain that the key to performance in all sports events lasting over 10 seconds comes down to an understanding of a few mostly cartoon pages in my physiology section. That’s a big claim isn’t it?

(Chris nods)

The basic premise of Lydiard’s system is incredibly simple, but don’t be fooled by this so-called simplicity. I like the notion that if an idea can’t be outlined on a business card, then it’s too complicated! So if I were to design Lydiard’s business card, I’d say “aerobic base dictates anaerobic training potential.” HOWEVER – and this is a BIG HOWEVER – there is a balance and sophistication about it that can be exquisite in its delivery, particularly in the final touches in track preparation in middle distance.

In each phase of preparation, there are subtleties and personal parameters that need to be understood to get the best results. Lydiard’s system delivered an amazing run of NZ world records and Olympic medals that has yet to be matched by any nation, Kenya included. We have to remember Snell won 3 out of 3 Olympic attempts, and his 1:44.3 world record for 800m run on grass in February 1962 is just about to celebrate its 48^th anniversary as the Oceania record: to this day, no athlete from either Australia or New Zealand has run faster. That’s a fact!

Unless another special talent emerges in either country in the very near future, we are looking at a national record that looks like being over 50 years old before it’s broken. How good is that? The Kenyan, Bungei won the Beijing Olympic final last year in 1:44.65, to give you an idea of how fast Snell’s time was.

Lydiard’s knowledge was earned the very hard way. He was his own lab rat – sometimes logging as much as 300 miles a week, sometimes as little as 30, while he formulated his approach. He turned himself from an overweight, unfit man approaching middle age to a New Zealand marathon champion several times over during middle age.

He read widely, and was strongly influenced by Arthur Newton’s theories on building endurance. Arthur kept detailed diaries and monitored his reactions to training like a scientist would. So with some more experience in coaching others over a number of years, he had a very good idea of the broad parameters within which most people within the “bell curve” could improve without over-doing things. Often the most elegant and sophisticated systems are based on the final assay of huge amounts of trial and error. It’s like what my chiropractic mentor Dr John Hinwood says when people ask him how he has such good judgement: he replies that he has such good judgement because he’s experienced many years of bad judgement!

CK: It is interesting that Arthur Lydiard’s method is still misinterpreted by so many, including top-end athletes. Rich Englehart, when exasperated with someone on a chatline finally said, “Lydiard is too simple for most people to appreciate”.

The beauty of the messaging today including your book and the Lydiard Foundation courses as well as McMillan Elite is in the delivery of the message, look at the results Greg McMillan is getting with his athletes, not just in the delivery, but also in the application. 

In the book, do you cover much in the way of the delivery and application of the system?

KL: Oh yes! Some would say too much! Lots of examples from the way we fine-tune athletes in our squad along the broad principles, allowing for individual reactions, that sort of thing. But the devil’s in the detail, and it’s not possible to dumb down the collective experiential knowledge of all the earlier Lydiard runners into simple black and white one-liners.

I’ve done this by getting up-front and personal, citing real-life examples of success and stuff-ups, many my own! So there’s a stream-of-consciousness narrative that ties the physiology together. We even have a section of “Case Histories” about athletes – one or two quite famous: others not famous at all, but all as valid as each other in getting points across.

When we were running with the older guys on long runs, they’d pull us back if we were going a bit too fast for the desired effect, that sort of thing. Magee did it with the emerging Snell on long runs under Lydiard’s instruction. It’s all in there!

CK: Lorraine Moller wrote the forward to the book. She being a cofounder of the Lydiard Foundation and trained on the Lydiard method producing a very long and successful running career, it must have been rewarding for you to hear her say that the Foundation will use the book as its official text for their training programs.

KL: Yes!

CK: Your book has gotten spectacular reviews from the aforementioned Lorraine Moller, also an original Lydiard athlete and your coach Barry Magee, as well as Tony Wilson of Glenhuntly Athletics. The book is billed ‘for serious runners and coaches’. So is this the ultimate reward, having the people who truly are intimate with the training method fully endorse your book?

KL: Yes – I’m very fortunate in having several very good reviews from people I respect greatly in athletics. Not only those people: it seems to hit the mark with others too. I saw one from a fellow called ‘Simon M’ in Boulder on the Amazon site: he gave it a 5 star rating. He’s obviously been around distance running, and Lydiard’s books, since 1978, and it hit the mark for him. Another guy has endorsed it highly too – Brian Taylor, a Lydiard coach in New Zealand for 40 years now. I caught up with him in person just over a week ago and watched his squad train in Christchurch. Good fun!

I like Barry Magee’s description: that the book “fills in the lines between the lines”. I realized a few years ago that I’d grown up just down the road from Lydiard, trained under his system with one of his first two athletes Barry Magee (the other was Murray Halberg), and was in a position to accurately write about what I knew, having worked for 5 years earlier as a copywriter with Radio New Zealand, and having trained as a chiropractor where I really concentrated on the physiology and biomechanics of exercise.

We don’t realize sometimes that we’re enmeshed in a continual storyline, and I had this revelation that I was enmeshed in the Lydiard storyline and was duty-bound to record what I knew. Don’t know why, but I took this on as a very important project, and if it helps just one athlete and coach get better, more consistent results, then I’m happy.

There are some things I picked up on and understood at a youngish age – little things – just from training with the older Lydiard guys on Sundays. Like a folklore, where knowledge would be rationed out by older, wiser hard men like Kevin Ryan, or by listening to someone like Lorraine, who I did a heap of running with in 1979. And of course the weekly philosophical talk with Coach Barry Magee, who Arthur, when he was still with us, named as the future repository of his system when he was gone.

I wrote the book for someone who was like me when I was in my early 20’s: a ton of enthusiasm, some good wins in championships under my belt, good natural speed and endurance, and a love for training and racing, but now and again missing my potential because of lack of knowledge. I actually moved to Australia in 1982 to study as a chiropractor to further my understanding of how everything comes together, thinking that I’d fly through that course and get back to my running at a high level later. But that didn’t quite pan out the way I thought it would, which is another story!

I haven’t seen Tony Wilson’s review, but Tony is a case in point and he actually appears as a ‘case history’ in the book. Here we have a guy who had been racing since he was in Little Athletics, who in his first year as a senior athlete at 20 ran 48.6 for 400m and a 1:49 for 800m. The 400m time alone is faster than that of many world-class middle-distance runners have ever achieved, so this guy had real potential.

This was when the myths about Sebastian Coe’s training were being propagated and believed around the world. Tony did his exceptional times as a youngster on a program with a local track coach who made sure he never ran for over an hour in any single ‘long’ run, and each training week when he was racing well included a blend of hill sprints, hard track reps, and weekend racing.

But as Arthur said, “Bad training can look remarkably like good training!”. Tony never ran faster, despite continuing with this sort of program for the next 19 years. By the time he got to me, he was 39, still in good shape, but frustrated at not being able to get at his obvious potential: he’d have yo-yo seasons results-wise, varying from pretty good to pretty darned awful considering his natural ability.

We have to pan out to macro to see what’s going on – look at our programs in context. In Tony’s case, the previous winter before his stunning debut senior track season many years before, he had enjoyed a full cross-country season, where he regularly joined the Glenhuntly distance athletes on long runs (2 hours plus) in the hills. So he’d built a good winter base from which some hard fast stuff that his granny could’ve given him would’ve got a result. Inadvertently he’d stumbled upon the original Lydiard method in all its simplicity. Long running till very fit, then fast work, to be followed by ANOTHER cycle of long running, then fast work, usually twice in a year, ad nauseam, improving every year. But he only cottoned onto the fast bit done with this “track coach”, and thought that this was “the way”. Pity – a real talent – but he’s redeemed himself lately with some Victorian age records.

Anyhow, the interesting thing in this case is that Tony contacted me after reading a few of my comments on another running blog site, and asked me to coach him. So I did, and after getting him to basically ease into a regime where he ran nearly twice his previous weekly volume, much slower, for winter, he came out in his 40^th year and ran 1:54.1 for 800 and 3:57 for 1500 – times he hadn’t even approached in 8 years. He could’ve run faster over 800m but never got into a race in ideal conditions – but he regularly trounced another guy who ran 1:52.0 that season. And he was consistent for the first time.

CK: Knowing that those who know and follow the Lydiard method, know it well. It’s like either you are in or you are out, once in there is no going back. You are an accomplished runner yourself growing up very near Arthur’s home. Did you really need to do much research.

KL: I knew the overview, obviously, but inadvertently. I did heaps of research because I am a naturally very curious individual who needs to understand things at the tin tacks level. I don’t necessarily accept other people’s beliefs or dogmas as “fact” until I’ve tested it – Lydiard included.

I was the kid who blew out every fuse in the house establishing the fact that a steak knife placed across the top two bars of a 240V household plug, while in the socket, would involve the conduction of large amounts of electricity, and that, yes, what my parents said about electricity was true. So anyhow (how did I go there?), this involved lots of phone calls to some of the original “Arthur’s Boys” to verify facts – this was part of my early journalistic training and it proved very handy. If I couldn’t substantiate a story or a line between a line, it wouldn’t get into print.

Then I got very, very curious about the muscle physiology, and what each type of work would be doing inside them ‘thar cells… and that involved a lot of reading. Google and the various physiology research websites got hit more than Sonny Liston received from Cassius Clay!

CK: Arthur was not a scientist by any means so it is interesting he was a little like Magellan in that all his early work was discovering the method, but he did and he also fine-tuned the delivery and application of the system I got that, but how in the world did he manage to get people (in the beginning) to believe in his passion. He must have been quite convincing.

KL: Well, results talk, don’t they? Initially people in Auckland in the late 1940’s saw this little ex-rugby player with a bit of spare padding join a running club to get fit. Then he’d be seen training at any time of the day or night, because he worked a number of jobs to support his family, then he started winning long road races at an age where most men would’ve quit competitive sport. So people gravitated to him out of curiosity I think, and found that he made sense! I don’t think he ever set out to change the world or anything – he just wanted to get himself fit and healthy, and it grew from there….

I never really met Arthur that much, despite the early connections of living in the same suburb and running for his club and being coached by one of his original pupils. Arthur wasn’t around in New Zealand for a long time: he was often overseas, and as a youngster in my late teens and early twenties I was living in other cities with my job with Radio New Zealand, and then I stayed on in Australia after coming here to study in 1982. So although I’ve written a book about his methods, and feel like I know the guy, in truth I was in his actual presence for only a few hours cumulatively. But that included a great Waiatarua run with him in our club running group in 1976, when he certainly was the life of the group, and extremely positive and encouraging. He was 59 then, but was like a little steam train. If I were to describe him from that, and from the lectures I attended, I’d say “fun-loving force of nature”. He was extremely dogmatic, and would bridle at questioning he thought was insolent, so no one messed with him, really. Some did, apparently, and got quite a bit more than they bargained on.

If you can appraise a man by the people he surrounded himself with, then he must’ve been a really fun guy! You can’t build a following without being genuinely interested in others, and being fun is a big part of that! Distance runners around the world are a good bunch of party people; pretty easy to get on with and very social. My memories of running as a youngster are all fun, and some of the guys would get up to all kinds of stuff!

Keith monologues on…

I’ll never forget, as an impressionable youngster, some of the amazing feats of recovery that New Zealand’s top distance guys could perform off the track. One of our guys, Paul Ballinger, personally coached by Arthur, was a tiny little fellow like Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island; not fast on the track, but he could run like the clappers over country or road, with his tachometer on the red-line the whole way. He won Fukuoka in 2:10 one year, which says something. Anyhow, I’ll never forget seeing him carried out of the presentation and function hall around midnight after a New Zealand road championships in which he’d been just pipped on the line in an extremely fast time. He was staggering all over the place, looking like he had bilharzias, malaria, cholera, and dysentery combined. He was doing the old Technicolor yawn all over the place, but the infective agent was beer and l lots of it; truly awful to behold. It all came up, with requisite chunky carrots, and then more, gallons. It went down the gutters of Whakatane, into the storm-water drains with so much flow that they couldn’t cope. The grates got blocked with a glutinous sludge of chunky carrot, bile, and poorly metabolized Steinlager beer.

CK: Surely you jest.

Keith continues:

How a guy so small could bring so much up and survive was the question.

Then the next day, very early, he’s up bright as a button for his long run like nothing had happened! Come to think of it, beer seems to feature in a lot of my early memories of the Lydiard system and the athletes. Barry Magee didn’t drink though, which shows how disciplined and special a man he is.

One older guy, who we’ll call Fred X to protect the guilty, was famous for being able to whip out his equipment during a long run and pee with uncanny accuracy onto the socks of the person beside him, often after climbing the big Waiatarua hill. They’d be basking in the relief of having knocked over ‘the hill’, then feel a warm sensation on the right sock. This was OK until he did it to a handy newcomer to the group, a redheaded 2:17 marathoner who wanted to punch his lights out and chased him at sub-5 minute miles along Scenic Drive. Fred could run under 2:20 for a marathon at 40, from memory, so he was no slouch, but he got a damned good VO2 max workout in during that run.

The New Zealand running scene in the 70’s was so much fun that every man and his dog would come down to Auckland to train. This was all a legacy of Arthur’s fun approach to running I’d say.

You didn’t have to leave Auckland to meet all the top dogs from around the world, and they’d often be looking for some decent training hacks to show them around the key courses. Chris Pilone, who lived to train, was on shift work and lived in Auckland for years, so he became number one training hack for all the greats, and that’s probably why he’s such a good coach these days. It was very enlightening; some ‘superstars’ found our southern heat, hills and humidity pretty tough going. We realized that these guys were working hard on our regular turf, so were obviously beatable.

I remember training with the little Swiss guy Marcus Ryffel, the silver medallist over 5000m in Moscow later in the year, early in 1980 on Shaw Road. Shaw Road is the poor man’s Waiatarua, exiting off the main course early, cutting out the dirty big hill, but still a toughie.

One moment he was there with Pilone and me, the next he was gone. He got picked up by someone in a car I think or did he wander in many minutes later to Kevin Ryan’s place? It’ll be in one of my training diaries somewhere, no doubt. Anyhow, it was revelation to me that a world-class Swiss guy could find our hilly courses difficult, but then I guess they don’t have the humidity and roadside fern trees there do they? So as I watched Moscow I got a real surprise when he did himself proud: I was saying to myself things like “So what if he got an Olympic medal? He couldn’t stay with Pilone and me on Shaw Road in January!” Perhaps I had my value system slightly distorted, but that’s what it was like.

CK: Again your book is labelled for ‘serious middle distance runners and coaches’. However, Lydiard applied his principles, to some degree, to joggers and heart patients. Of course the same physiological effects apply to everyone of any ability, but saying that, do you think you are selling your book to more of an exclusive audience than otherwise might be possible.

KL: You’re probably right, and I’m considering a generalized H.I.T book that can be applied to all sports and levels of ability. That’s my next project after finishing my shed. However, I really didn’t want to attempt something that was all things to all people in running – where does one stop? Some books even tell you how to tie shoelaces; now come on! We’ll be running with ponytails and lycra compression tights next! Oops…sorry Chris… that’s a nice ponytail you’ve got there, mate! And I like the 2XU scrunchy, nice touch….

(defiantly he jests on)

But really, if we’re writing about the Lydiard system, it’s got to be all or nothing. The long work CANNOT be compromised. If it is, then it is no longer Lydiard’s system, and I’m scared of Arthur even though he’s been dead over 4 years!

Too many personal trainers and “sports scientists” with ponytails and compression tights have been assiduously chipping away at the edges of Lydiardism, peddling their compromised versions, till all we get is meaningless articles in popular running mags for the masses warning people of the dangers of good old-fashioned, decent mileage. What a load of cobblers!

Next thing we’ll have these guys shortening the marathon distance to avoid the dangers of glycogen depletion! If you increase loads sensibly and wear good shoes, you just adapt and get as fit as hell, and get so strong that your friends who religiously follow all the carefully prepared and balanced “get your PB 5k in 6 weeks” speed programs just get blown away. Period.

(Keith’s pen makes deep gouge marks through paper into desk surface as he completes crude stick drawing of personal trainer in ponytail)

I’ve seen plenty of people who couldn’t run out of sight on a dark night just get stuck into mileage and totally embarrass more highly talented people cautiously and carefully coached by people with ponytails. One guy coached by Magee or Dick Quax ended up with a sub-30 10k track title and a 2:15 marathon, and at full speed he resembled a Clydesdale towing a full harness and plough. Forgotten his name at present, but he did the job, didn’t he? That’s all that counts in the end.

CK: Apparently you have added to or used a fair amount of space to feature the under appreciated hill phase. I read where many athletes do limit the hill phase, run their own hill phase or just run hilly environments all the time, therefore avoid the specific 4 – 6 period of time that Lydiard created, using bounding, repeats and circuits.

How important is the hill phase in relation to the speed, coordination, sharpening and marathon conditioning phases.

KL: Hill training, correctly performed, is wonderful for polishing sprint technique, improving efficiency at speed, and introducing flexibility into the tendons and joints of the lower limb. Jim Bush, who coached 1992 Olympic 400m champ Quincy Watts, was a big advocate of Lydiard’s hill exercises.

I’d say it gets more important the shorter your race distance. For marathon, it’s useful in developing a certain running economy, but then marathon isn’t about springing like a gazelle for 42.2 kms, is it? If you can master the basic exercises over several weeks each season, then it’s a very good thing to do. I read Peter Coe’s book that he wrote with David E Martin in the 1990’s, and after reading it couldn’t tell you one more thing about Coe’s mileage phase, (which as we now know was really intelligently Lydiard-based all along) but what I could see for certain once the smoke disappeared was that Coe phased in a block of longer hill sprints at slower speeds, then shorter hill sprints at faster speeds, and various hill-based resistance exercises. He did OK, didn’t he? He had several different types of hill circuit near his London base, on a hillier part of the Thames valley.

But to answer your question, I put all that stuff in because it was very much a part of the very successful original programmes, and I’ve never seen it explained in detail before.

Actually the bulk of that material came from Nobby Hashizume, our energetic Japanese-American co-founder of the Lydiard Foundation.

Everyone in the known world seems to know Nobby; he pops up anywhere Lydiard’s name is mentioned, and must have his hard drive bursting with archival stuff. If you want to know what brand of diaper Lasse Viren’s mum favoured, just ask Nobby. If he can’t get it for you straight away, he knows someone who can. Honestly!

He was a career triple jumper who wanted to run a decent marathon, and rather than buy a Lydiard book and get a coach, he did one better: he went and stayed with Lydiard for a year; drank his beer, warmed his bed, ate his food, shared his razor, fathered his children.

I just found out more about the original circuit from two of “Arthur’s boys”: Barry Magee and Vern Walker. The history interests me as much as the physiology, and I’ve recorded it for history’s sake. Maybe one day a kid growing up in Whitney St. Blockhouse Bay will become a good runner and realize he grew up on Lydiard’s original hill circuit!

CK: Anything else on explosive power.

I have also explored the physiology of this plyometric work as far as re-activating the most explosive muscle fibres, the type IIB fast-twitch.

We go into some detail because if coaches can see what is being attempted, and understand the physiology of it, then they can take those ideas away with them and insert those sessions creatively into a schedule. If you don’t understand it, and can’t see it demonstrated, then you’re likely to skip it.

Plenty of world-class athletes have abbreviated this phase or not done it, with no apparent loss, but then we still see that the guys who did it best, like Halberg and Snell, were capable of some of the fastest finishes ever recorded in international track titles. Halberg ran a 53.8s last 440 yards to win the 1958 Empire Games 3-mile title, yet his best-listed time for the 440 yards was 52.5! 

Snell… well… if you ever watch footage of his 1964 Olympic 1500m win, you’ll see what hill training can do! One moment he’s with the pack, the next he’s burst clear, making great world-class athletes look like pack-horses, and then he relaxes into the finish with his arms in the air, having cleared out by over 10 metres while he relaxes! All over, Red Rover! Too easy! His last 300 took 38.6, with a last lap of 52.5, but the real action took place in the back straight 100 and last curve 100, covered in 25s flat for 200m.

The hill work phase was practiced by different people in different ways. Pekka Vasala, who along with Lasse Viren was one of Lydiard’s great Finnish success stories, apparently he used hill resistance work deep into his Munich Olympic track program.

CK: Ron Daws, a Lydiard advocate, Olympian and Author had said that it is within the average male’s capability to manage a 2:30 marathon if trained properly. What are your thoughts on that statement?

KL: Absolutely yes! Ron would know! He made the Mexico Olympics in the marathon with next to no natural speed or talent. His was the ultimate “ugly duckling” story – a guy with a best mile time slower than 4:25 who used his brains and trained methodically. I knew Ron; he was Lorraine Moller’s coach in her early marathon years, and her first husband. Very encouraging guy – a bit ‘crazy’- but which top runner isn’t? Ron wrote a top book in 1985 –“Running Your Best”, which greatly clarified many concepts and approaches for me. It’s worth getting a copy if you can find one – I’m looking at my copy right now: ISBN 0-8289-0559-2. I saw there were two old copies on Amazon when I checked it out a few minutes ago – only $40! Ron died young in 1992, unfortunately.

When I was on the Lydiard program in New Zealand, 2:30 was definitely considered a time any solid club runner could do. Many did. It was simply no big deal at all! In fact, for a good runner it was Sunday run pace for 22 miles or more. I know of one guy here in Australia, Damien Cooke, who was a late-starting fun-runner when he first joined our Sunday run group in outer Melbourne, around 1984. His marathon debut was around 3:58, in the Melbourne marathon, maybe slower. However, he loved the running life and was keen as mustard. Over the years he got more serious and by his late thirties he’d recorded 2:21, and 14:25 for 5000m, as well as sneaking under 4 minutes for 1500m. That’s not bad for a fun-runner, is it?

CK: That is brilliant for a fun runner. Can you define crazy when you refer to Ron.

KL: Ron was famous for never having a car worth more than $500. A hangover from the 60’s hippie thing maybe; I don’t know. Lorraine told me that on one occasion he invited all his mates to his place in Minneapolis to have a car burial party for one of his recently deceased. The idea was to smash the car up with mallets, drink lots of beer, dig a big hole communally with this male gathering, and bury the car. They achieved the first two goals admirably, but then everyone was too tired and sleepy to dig a hole, so that was that. That would’ve impressed the neighbours, surely!

On the one hand he was like that, and on the other he was a self-made Olympian, brilliant running writer, and coach! Isn’t humanity fabulous? He was also famous for being able to demolish a whole 2-litre tub of ice cream at one sitting, and seemed to prefer this stuff to real food. Heavens knows what that would do to the endocrine system! He dropped dead from a heart attack at 50, which was a great shame, but on the cards. Running is great for the heart, but it can’t protect us from excess like that!

CK: Earlier you mentioned Blog site chats. Do you visit Let’s Run or NZ Run?

KL: I’ve seen the former (Let’s Run dot com) – a very good site. Will check out the latter, and I should as a passport-holding New Zealand citizen.

CK: I found your index on the net, you have pages on such sausage study as, page 102 ‘A study of Sausages’, Page 207 ‘Sausage Country’, Page 205 ‘The Story of Sausages’ and others such as, Nutritional Benefits of Sausages and Sausages for Beginners.

I don’t even have a question really; just hoping you might enlighten me.

KL: Oh, sausages! That stuff is all from Professor Roger Robinson, a running mate who was the best masters distance runner in the world for a few years. Roger managed to represent New Zealand and England in world cross-country titles. He co-developed a great method of structuring cross-country training for groups of very mixed abilities, early in the 1960’s while a student at Cambridge with Mike Turner, also a cross-country international. Because it was based on long intervals of constant running over whatever terrain came up, with short recoveries, it could be described graphically like a string of sausages. Great article, very funny, very useful progressive training to insert into the cross-country season, so I “borrowed” it, just like Robbie’s (Johnston) article on Walker and El Guerrouj.

The funny thing about this was that my original manuscript deliberately avoided getting into nutrition, because I didn’t want to get away from the pure physiology and principles too much.

However, my publishers are German, and one of the keen-eyed Saxons must have glanced quickly at the same index when writing the blurb for the book in the Meyer & Meyer catalogue. Being German, I guess he or she saw the word ‘sausage’, and decided that I covered nutrition in detail as well as everything else. So as that was promised in the sales blurb, and I then felt duly obliged to write a chapter or so on this. It turned out for the best, though, and makes the book more complete.

 ________________________________________________________________________________________

 Christopher Kelsall is sponsored by Island Runner Footwear, located in Victoria, BC - Check out the store’s site: Island Runner.   – Site temporarily down due to maintanence.

=======================
This is an excellent time of year to consider what you would like to accomplish athletically in the upcoming New Year. As with many things, planning is the key to accomplishment for your race season.

If you are a recreational athlete and your goal is simply to complete your events, then you only need to train one aspect of fitness; endurance. This entails planning enough time to slowly build your mileage to within about 10-15% of the distance of your goal race. Note that many overuse injuries are caused by too much mileage too quickly. Do not increase your duration more than 10% per week and take at least every fourth week as a rest and recovery week. During a rest and recovery week, you should cut back your mileage by at least 25%, reduce your overall training volume, and add in an extra rest or active recovery day. If you are a runner, take a day of non-impact cross-training in place of a run.

Competitive athletes, however, must take a different approach. A competitive athlete, by my definition, is any athlete who sets a specific performance goal. This may be as simple as a personal record. You do not have to win races to be competitive. If you would like to set a personal record or race placement goal this season, it will require more careful planning and organization of your race events. Start by prioritizing races into A, B, and C events.

Your “A” events are the ones you will direct your training efforts towards. For best results, all of your A events should be similar or of the same format (ex. sprint triathlon). These are your main goals for the season and your training should gradually progress towards these races or events. Put these on your calendar first. Note that A races take time to train for. Plan on spending at least 12 weeks of specific and directed training for an A race; this is called “peaking.” Schedule your A races in 4 week clusters or separate them by at least 10-12 weeks. Your training should ramp up in intensity and specificity as you approach your A races. Your last workouts prior to your A race taper should closely mimic race intensity and format.

What is a “taper?” Tapering means reducing training volume prior to a goal race in order to facilitate total and complete recovery. You should incorporate a taper a week or two prior to A race(s). The length of the taper will depend on the length of your event; the longer the event the longer the taper length. From a training stand point there is nothing you can do the week of a goal race to physiologically increase performance but there are many opportunities to reduce it. After completing an A race plan on taking a week of active rest and recovery.

“B” events are training events you would like to do well at, but are not goal races. B events are excellent warm ups for A events. They are an opportunity to test and hone your race skills without the pressure of an A event. B events do not have to be the same format as an A event, but should help contribute to your A race performance. You still want to give 100% for a B event. An example would be a 10k running event prior to an Olympic distance triathlon. You should rest or reduce your training load a few days before a B event but do not taper as you would for an A event.

“C” events are fun events you enjoy doing, but are not goal related. These are good events to leave the heart rate monitor at home for. You do not have to push yourself physically during these events or have any performance objectives. I like my athletes to schedule C events during their base training to keep their enthusiasm up. C events can be completely different from your A events. If you are a runner, you could do 50-mile cycling event for charity. C events keep you active and interested in training.

A good place to start is with a 12-month planning calendar. Put your A races on first and proceed on to B and C events. It is important to not schedule C events close to your goal events. This time is reserved for more specific and directed training. Not only does prioritizing your races help with your training, it also helps identify what you would like to accomplish as an athlete. Don’t let your races sneak up on you!

==============

YOU have what seems to be a really bad cold. You are coughing and sneezing, and it is hard to breathe. Should you work out? And if you do, should you push yourself as hard as ever or take it easy? Will exercise have no effect, or make you feel better or worse?

It is a question, surprisingly enough, that stumps many exercise physiologists and infectious disease specialists.

“That question has not been actually studied,” said Dr. Aaron E. Glatt, a spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society and the president of New Island Hospital in Bethpage, N.Y.

Many avid exercisers make up their own rules, and it seems that many of them, like Dr. Michael Joyner, an exercise researcher at the Mayo Clinic who is a swimmer and runner, decide to keep exercising if they possibly can.

“I can tell you that unless I am really wiped out, I still work out but maybe scale back a bit,” Dr. Joyner said. “I think that would be the answer from most relatively hard-core, old-school types.

“If I have an obvious fever and muscle aches,” he continued, “I do very little or take a day or two off, but I really have to be in a bad way to skip more than that.”

Dr. Bill Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University and a member of the board of directors of the Infectious Diseases Society, said he was unaware of any studies that addressed the issue.

Dr. Schaffner described himself as a jogger who runs a few miles most days and goes to a gym for resistance training. And, he said, he continues his workouts when he has a cold.

Exercise, he said, makes him feel better. He speculates that perhaps it is because his blood vessels are dilated when he exercises.

“I think exercise pushes me along a route to recovery,” Dr. Schaffner said. “Of course, I recognize that I might have been on a route to recovery anyway. But I can’t think of a reason why exercise would affect you adversely.”

It turns out that, even though they were unaware of them, the strategies of people like Dr. Schaffner and Dr. Joyner are actually supported by two little-known studies that were published a decade ago in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Results from the studies were so much in favor of exercise that the researchers themselves were surprised.

The studies began, said Leonard Kaminsky, an exercise physiologist at Ball State University, when a trainer at the university, Thomas Weidner, wondered what he should tell athletes when they got colds.

The first question was: Does a cold affect your ability to exercise? To address that, the researchers recruited 24 men and 21 women ages 18 to 29 and of varying levels of fitness who agreed to be deliberately infected with a rhinovirus, which is responsible for about a third of all colds. Another group of 10 young men and women served as controls; they were not infected.

At the start of the study, the investigators tested all of the subjects, assessing their lung functions and exercise capacity. Then a cold virus was dropped into the noses of 45 of the subjects, and all caught head colds. Two days later, when their cold symptoms were at their worst, the subjects exercised by running on treadmills at moderate and intense levels. The researchers reported that having a cold had no effect on either lung function or exercise capacity.

“I was surprised their lung function wasn’t impaired,” Dr. Kaminsky said. “I was surprised their overall exercise performance wasn’t impaired, even though they were reporting feeling fatigued.”

He said he also tested the subjects at different points in the exercise sessions, from moderate to intense effort, and found that their colds had no effect on their metabolic responses.

Another question was: Does exercising when you have a cold affect your symptoms and recovery time?

Once again, Dr, Kaminsky and his colleagues infected volunteers with a rhinovirus. This time, the subjects were 34 young men and women who were randomly assigned to a group that would exercise with their colds and 16 others who were assigned to rest.

The group that exercised ran on treadmills for 40 minutes every other day at moderate levels of 70 percent of their maximum heart rates.

Every 12 hours, all the subjects in the study completed questionnaires about their symptoms and physical activity. The researchers collected the subjects’ used facial tissues, weighing them to assess their cold symptoms.

The investigators found no difference in symptoms between the group that exercised and the one that rested. And there was no difference in the time it took to recover from the colds. But when the exercisers assessed their symptoms, Dr. Kaminsky said, “people said they felt O.K. and, in some cases, they actually felt better.”

Now, Dr. Kaminsky said, he and others at Ball State encourage people to exercise when they have colds, at least if they have the type producing symptoms like runny noses and sneezing. He is more cautious about other types of colds that produce fevers or symptoms below the neck such as chest congestion. Exercising with a head cold is not an issue for athletes, Dr. Kaminsky said, because most of them want to train no matter what. “If anything they tend to push too much,” he said.

Dr. Kaminsky also runs a fitness program at the university, dealing with regular exercisers. When he tells them it is all right to exercise when they have a cold, many are “a little suspicious,” he said. Often, they want to back off a little, lowering the intensity of their efforts.

“We tell them that’s O.K. if it’s for a short period of time,” Dr. Kaminsky said. “But what you have to be cautious of, where I see it as more of an issue, is with people who are trying to build that exercise habit. They’ve got all these barriers anyway.”

AND too often taking time off because of a cold is the start of falling away from the program entirely.

Dr. Kaminsky, who runs and works out on elliptical cross trainers and does resistance training, takes the studies’ findings to heart. Now when he has a cold, he continues to work out.

“It did give me the personal assurance that it was a good thing to do,” he said.

============

LIKE so many people around the world, Dr. Michael Joyner was transfixed watching Michael Phelps swim in the Summer Olympics. But while many of us focused on Mr. Phelps’s world records, Dr. Joyner, a competitive Masters swimmer and an exercise researcher at the Mayo Clinic, noticed something else.

“I have never seen anyone so relaxed in the water,” he said.

Relaxation. It is a trait that is often underappreciated, coaches and athletic trainers say. Yet it can make the difference between doing your best and not doing well, between feeling dragged down or soaring. Coaches search for better ways to teach it. And many athletes, including some of the world’s best, work on it constantly. An ability to relax while pushing hard, exercise researchers say, is one reason why winners win.

“It’s the paradox of athletics,” said Rick DeMont, associate head coach for men’s swimming at the University of Arizona and a former Olympian. “Tension is slow, tension is inefficient. You need to be relaxed.” And relaxation can be taught.

“If a person is willing to learn, they will learn it,” said Ralph Reiff, a certified athletic trainer and director of St. Vincent Sports Performance Center in Indianapolis.

Coaches agree.

“Some started in a better position than others, but nearly everyone I’ve ever had can improve,” said Clyde Hart, the director of track and field at Baylor University. Mr. Hart has coached some of the world’s best runners, including Michael Johnson and Jeremy Wariner. He now coaches Sanya Richards, who won bronze and gold medals at the Beijing Games.

Yet relaxation also is a mysterious state and hard to describe. It’s one of those situations in which you know it when you achieve it.

Athletes who get there “always feel wonderful,” Mr. DeMont said. But, he adds, “you don’t get there by trying really hard to get there.”

In a sense, relaxation goes against most athletes’ instincts. Mr. Hart likes to point out the way elementary and middle school children run. “The kids throw their heads back,” Mr. Hart said. “They think that the harder they go, the faster they run.” That sort of body tension is the first thing Mr. Hart tries to correct. “The quickest way to improve a kid is to teach him to relax,” Mr. Hart said.

But it’s also important for athletes to realize that relaxing does not mean slowing down. “A lot of athletes don’t know the difference between relaxing and not running,” Mr. Hart said. With runners, he said, the upper body must relax but, he added, “the lower body is going to run.”

One of his tricks is to have athletes concentrate on relaxing their eyes. “If they’re wide eyed, they’re tense,” Mr. Hart said. “I tell runners to run sleepy eyed. It’s like pouring a soothing oil over the body.” As the eyes relax, the face starts to relax, the jaw relaxes and then, Mr. Hart said, he tells runners to let the feeling spread through the shoulders and arms.

“You want your arms to be your rhythm,” he said. “They may not help you, but they can hurt you big time if your arms are tense and you are gripping your hands tightly.”

Mr. DeMont said that in track and swimming it helps to relax the lower jaw and make sure you are breathing with your diaphragm and your stomach.

And Mr. Reiff said that he tells runners to stay tall, avoiding the rolled shoulders and tight upper body form that comes with fatigue and being too tense. He tells them to rehearse the phrase, “stay tall” to themselves while they run. And, he said, coaches or a friend on the sideline during a race can shout it out if a runner shows tenseness.

“If you are a coach on the sideline and holler to your runners, ‘stay tall,’ all of a sudden they lift themselves out of that position,” Mr. Reiff said.

People like Michael Phelps, these experts say, are masters of relaxation, able to get into a rhythm and stay there even with the intense pressure of Olympic competition.

For example, Mr. DeMont said, when Mr. Phelps swam, his stroke count remained the same in every lap. A tense and inefficient swimmer, he added, will take more strokes with every lap of the pool. Mr. Phelps, he said, “was able to nail it every time.” He is, Mr. DeMont said, “a rhythm master.”

COACHES and athletic trainers say athletes always know when they relax. Mr. DeMont asks people to remember the best they ever did in a race or in training. “Think of how darn good it felt,” he said. “That’s the feeling you are after.”

It makes sense to Dr. Joyner. He explained that when people start to train and compete, these experiences of being relaxed happen at random. “But if you pay attention you can increase the odds of them happening again and again,” he said. “To me this is what people talk about when they say they are ‘in the zone.’ ”

It happened to Dr. Joyner recently when he ran a half marathon after what he said was minimal training. Somehow he finished the race in 1 hour 38 minutes, a result that shocked him.

“It’s a strange thing because at some level you are reading the fatigue and ‘pain’ from your body and using it to get and stay right on the razor’s edge,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I put pain in quotes because you hurt, but it is not painful in the traditional sense because you are using it and you are not fearful and are just sort of ‘right there.’ ”

“It was interesting when I ran that half marathon,” Dr. Joyner said. “I had not run a race in like 11 years but I was able to get right into a rhythm and just sort of do it. What did Yogi say? ‘It was like déjà vu all over again.’ ”

“At some level,” Dr. Joyner added, “everyone I know who has been a hard-core endurance athlete for many years is a covert religious mystic due to these types of experiences.”

INVESTIGATORS have begun two large studies of stretching, asking about its effectiveness in much the way scientists might ask about a new drug or medical device. They’re actively recruiting thousands of volunteers to participate, in the United States and elsewhere, and randomly assigning participants to use the method, or not. That is the only way, researchers say, to detect the subtle effects that most treatments and exercise interventions might be expected to evoke.

The studies are being done independently, one by researchers based in Norway and Australia and the other by a group in the United States.

The studies are not identical, reflecting perhaps the different views of stretching worldwide. People in Norway and Australia stretch for different reasons than people in the United States and do slightly different stretches. Yet exercisers and coaches everywhere, the researchers report, tend to have passionate convictions about the merits of stretching, or lack thereof.

Continue reading …

By Sandra Mcculloch and published in the Victoria Times Colonist

Combine technology with a treasure hunt, set the venue in a B.C. provincial park and you have a new venture announced yesterday by the province, the B.C. 150 Secretariat and the B.C. Geocaching Association.

Geocaching is a recreational activity that’s growing in popularity, with hundreds — perhaps thousands — of geocachers on the Island. The sport involves the use of a handheld global positioning system receiver to locate hidden caches, typically small objects stored in watertight containers.

Clues are posted on a website so others can go out and hunt for items. Anyone finding a cache is supposed to log the find in a notebook, exchange a new item for the found one, and report the find on a website.

To celebrate B.C.’s 150th anniversary, members of the BCGA have placed limited-edition commemorative coins in 100 provincial parks.

The announcement of the GeoRush 2008 program was made by Environment Minister Barry Penner at Gowlland Tod provincial park yesterday.

The program "will encourage people to participate in a fun and healthy activity in our provincial parks," said Penner.

Guidelines will help protect sensitive areas, he said.

He tried geocaching himself after making the announcement and found it challenging. "I was able to find it but only with the help of a young girl who said she’d been doing it for three years already.

"She had a better instinct that I did with the GPS device."

The BCGA is pleased the province is helping to promote the sport, said association director Chris Edley.

"Geocaching is all about promoting a healthy lifestyle and exploring the world around you, and what better place to do that than our beautiful provincial parks?"

GeoRush 2008 is open to everyone, said Penner. Tradition calls for participants to sign a log book and leave a small object behind in exchange for the commemorative coin or any other object they take.

While B.C. is encouraging geocachers to make full use of provincial parks, the federal government has limited the activity to pathways in national parks so it doesn’t damage fragile areas.

Parks Canada also requires geocachers to register, meet with a parks employee prior to depositing a cache and pay applicable park user fees.

For information on GeoRush 2008, look for links on the B.C. Provincial Parks website at www.bcparks.ca .

Steve Osaduik is hunting down the Olympic standard, contesting the May 25th ING, National Capital Marathon in Ottawa, Ontario. This is absolutely his last chance to qualify for Beijing 2008.

Eric Kiauka has his sites on the steeple. Last week he ripped a personal best indoor 3000m in 8:05. He did this at the home of the Huskies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“25 hours straight through the night and we only stopped for gas,” says Eric describing his drive from Vancouver to Flagstaff with Osaduik.

What does a character runner do after pulling an all-nighter? Go for a 30 minute run immediately upon arrival!

Steve’s well documented knee issue is nearly behind him and is getting better all the time. Watch for my upcoming editorial on the unique treatment Steve received that helped in his turn around.

I ask Steve, “How are you adapting to elevation.”

“If I stand up quickly I nearly pass out…”

…he continues…

“I have adjusted well. I am set now. Going down to 3500 and 4500 feet feels like running at sea level, and that is why we are up here. I ran a 10 miler today and my heart rate was at 120 for the whole run, lower than my runs back home, so it is safe to say that I have adjusted just fine.”

Wildlife report

“I am out for a second run of 8 miles after my Friday workout in Camp Verde and 2.5 miles into it I am clicking off 6 minute pace on a recovery run, too fast!

I try to slow down, but the pace stays high; the wind is blowing me all over the road. A Husky comes flying out of the bushes, he locks eyes with me. I have my headphones in. I hold out my hand to suggest he doesn’t approach any closer. He side steps me, and continues across the highway and disappears into the bushes. Only in Flagstaff! I finished the 8 miles at a ridiculous pace, for a recovery run.”

This tells us Steve is adjusting well; he didn’t have his guard-Chihuahua, ‘El Sanchez’ with him, where he uses him as cougar bait, while running on Vancouver Island.

“Saturday was a comfortable long run at 7000 feet, with some Flagstaff resident runners and a group from Indiana, Eric and I settled for a 90 minute option.

I hit my first marathon workout on Friday, down at Camp Verde, which is at 3500 feet.
The workout required 4x 3 miles at marathon pace with 1000m jog at 5:35 per mile. A real Daniel’s workout I was told (exercise physiologist, Dr. Jack Daniels). I did 2 x 3 mi. and then 1 mile at a good clip. I felt very good and probably could have done one more 3 miler, but I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew in my first hard effort.”

“When you get into a hole up here, it is tough to climb back out,”added Steve.

I ask Eric, about his adjustment to altitude.

“It’s been a week and I’m starting to feel more and more comfortable. The legs are feeling really good so far. I feel the longer I’ve been up here, the easier the beginning of the runs have been.

I did a 600m workout on Sunday and averaged 1:36 with a strong wind at 3 degrees, but it was tough to find another gear. Hopefully that will change the longer I’m up here.”

The Speed River boys

Reid Coolsaet and Eric Gillis with Speed River Racing Team are also in Flagstaff. Reid has a few personal bests, which one would think should give him a nod from Athletics Canada. Especially his 13:21, 5k in July 2007.

Reid says, “Just got to Flagstaff the other day. For the first week, Eric Gillis and I are taking it easy and just getting used to altitude. Yesterday we did a run with Kiauka and Oz. There are so many runners here and it’s easy to hook up with others for runs, it’s a very welcoming running community.

Last year I eased into the running and it worked, so I’ll do that again. The one thing that I’m going to change this year is to not be as aggressive at the beginning of workouts.”

Sounds like Eric and Reid are experiencing the same effect from altitude.

“I didn’t realize just how hard it was to recover between intervals and I learned the hard way. Basically my mile repeats would be 6 seconds slower, when normally I like them to be a second or two quicker from the first to the fifth.”

All three commented on the snow and ice covering the roads and the vast difference in temperatures was mentioned, 2 degrees at 7000 ft and 22 degrees at 2500. Additionally, they have some adjustments to make to altitude however, are clearly not afraid to put in the work.

There are some triathletes in Flagstaff too, led by the best of them, Simon Whitfield, from Victoria.

Here’s to happy altitude training to all of them!

And sure they put in great work, but Steve finished with this nugget, “…a nice easy run and we are heading out again this afternoon, then to the bar for St. Patty’s Day.”

Now you’re talking!

As a symbol of health and wellness, nothing surpasses the simple push-up. Practically everyone remembers the actor Jack Palance performing age-defying push-ups during his Oscar acceptance speech. More recently, Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor whose last lecture became an Internet sensation, did push-ups to prove his fitness despite having pancreatic cancer.

“It takes strength to do them, and it takes endurance to do a lot of them,” said Jack LaLanne, 93, the fitness pioneer who astounded television viewers in the 1950s with his fingertip push-ups. “It’s a good indication of what kind of physical condition you’re in.”

The push-up is the ultimate barometer of fitness. It tests the whole body, engaging muscle groups in the arms, chest, abdomen, hips and legs. It requires the body to be taut like a plank with toes and palms on the floor. The act of lifting and lowering one’s entire weight is taxing even for the very fit.

“You are just using your own body and your body’s weight,” said Steven G. Estes, a physical education professor and dean of the college of professional studies at Missouri Western State University. “If you’re going to demonstrate any kind of physical strength and power, that’s the easiest, simplest, fastest way to do it.”

But many people simply can’t do push-ups. Health and fitness experts, including the American College of Sports Medicine, have urged more focus on upper-body fitness. The aerobics movement has emphasized cardiovascular fitness but has also shifted attention from strength training exercises.

Moreover, as the nation gains weight, arms are buckling under the extra load of our own bodies. And as budgets shrink, public schools often do not offer physical education classes — and the calisthenics that were once a childhood staple.

In a 2001 study, researchers at East Carolina University administered push-up tests to about 70 students ages 10 to 13. Almost half the boys and three-quarters of the girls didn’t pass.

Push-ups are important for older people, too. The ability to do them more than once and with proper form is an important indicator of the capacity to withstand the rigors of aging.

Researchers who study the biomechanics of aging, for instance, note that push-ups can provide the strength and muscle memory to reach out and break a fall. When people fall forward, they typically reach out to catch themselves, ending in a move that mimics the push-up. The hands hit the ground, the wrists and arms absorb much of the impact, and the elbows bend slightly to reduce the force.

In studies of falling, researchers have shown that the wrist alone is subjected to an impact force equal to about one body weight, says James Ashton-Miller, director of the biomechanics research laboratory at the University of Michigan.

“What so many people really need to do is develop enough strength so they can break a fall safely without hitting their head on the ground,” Dr. Ashton-Miller said. “If you can’t do a single push-up, it’s going to be difficult to resist that kind of loading on your wrists in a fall.”

And people who can’t do a push-up may not be able to help themselves up if they do fall.

“To get up, you’ve got to have upper-body strength,” said Peter M. McGinnis, professor of kinesiology at State University of New York College at Cortland who consults on pole-vaulting biomechanics for U.S.A. Track and Field, the national governing body for track.

Natural aging causes nerves to die off and muscles to weaken. People lose as much as 30 percent of their strength between 20 and 70. But regular exercise enlarges muscle fibers and can stave off the decline by increasing the strength of the muscle you have left.

Women are at a particular disadvantage because they start off with about 20 percent less muscle than men. Many women bend their knees to lower the amount of weight they must support. And while anybody can do a push-up, the exercise has typically been part of the male fitness culture. “It’s sort of a gender-specific symbol of vitality,” said R. Scott Kretchmar, a professor of exercise and sports science at Penn State. “I don’t see women saying: ‘I’m in good health. Watch me drop down and do some push-ups.’ ”

Based on national averages, a 40-year-old woman should be able to do 16 push-ups and a man the same age should be able to do 27. By the age of 60, those numbers drop to 17 for men and 6 for women. Those numbers are just slightly less than what is required of Army soldiers who are subjected to regular push-up tests.

If the floor-based push-up is too difficult, start by leaning against a countertop at a 45-degree angle and pressing up and down. Eventually move to stairs and then the floor.

Mr. LaLanne, who once set a world record by doing 1,000 push-ups in 23 minutes, still does push-ups as part of his daily workout. Now he balances his feet and each hand on three chairs.

“That way I can go way down, even lower than if I was on the floor,” he said. “That’s really tough.”

================================

I sometimes wonder if there are any prerequisites at all to getting a job as a college strength and conditioning coach. As the owner of my private athletic training company I have had the opportunity to work with athletes from numerous colleges and universities across the country and have witnessed their disgust with their schools strength and conditioning programs. Some athletes, such as those attending Arizona State, are fortunate enough to have outstanding strength coaches and tremendous programs that they need not look elsewhere for help. Others are not so lucky. Every August I try to send my athletes back to their respective schools as one of the strongest, fastest, and most well conditioned players on their team. Come December I see the unlucky one’s come back to me weaker, smaller and slower. These athletes have the misfortune of training under some Neanderthal strength coach who hasn’t learned anything new about weight training since the release of Pumping Iron. There have been countless advances in the field of strength and conditioning over the last ten years, yet very few people seem to take advantage of them. It is inexcusable that in 2004, a college strength and conditioning coach does not have a thorough knowledge of exercise and nutrition and can not properly prepare their teams for competition. If your athletes are losing size and strength, slowing down, and becoming more injury prone I think it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Every college athlete that hires me as their strength coach brings me their schools workout to look at before we get started. Some of the things I see in those programs are absolutely unfathomable.

One such example of the insanity is the baseball player I train whose school conditioning program includes running three miles through the city of Philadelphia ala Rocky Balboa every morning at 6am before lifting. Long distance running is useless for nearly every sport, especially baseball. Baseball players will normally run no more than 90 feet at any one particular time. That 90 foot sprint usually comes only once every half hour or so and only if the player gets a hit. So how, I ask, does running three miles each morning improve your ability to play the game of baseball? The only player on the field who needs real endurance is the pitcher. A well known strength coach once told me that if a baseball player can play Playstation in the locker room, without getting winded, he is aerobically fit enough for the game. Baseball is a game of skill and hand-eye coordination and the players need size, strength and speed. The major leagues are filled with pumped up monsters that hit 500 foot home runs and can bench press a car, yet many college coaches continue to run their players into the ground. Endless distance running will only cause the athletes to lose size, strength and most importantly’games. To get a few more wins this season, ditch the counterproductive marathon training and get your baseball players doing sprints and lifting heavy weights.

Another one of my athletes is a Division 1 field hockey player whose conditioning test on the first day of camp consists of running from New York to Los Angeles and back in under an hour. I am, of course, exaggerating but not by much. The test involves more running in one morning than the girls will run in a seasons worth of games. Field hockey players must be highly conditioned, no doubt, but the best way to achieve that high level of conditioning is not through an outdated approach of long distance running. Coaches who implement this kind of training are preparing their athletes for a marathon, not a stop and go sport such as field hockey. While the athlete’s may be able to run a faster time in the mile, the question is, how does that equate to better performance on the field? The answer is obvious, it doesn’t. There is no sport that consists of running miles at a time. Most sports involve a combination of sprinting, jogging and even walking. Field hockey is no different and as such, these athletes would be best served to do a mix of interval sprint training and longer 200-400 meter sprints. A colleague of mine who works with several NHL players, arguably the most highly conditioned of all athletes, has found that 400 meter sprints performed three times weekly works wonders for conditioning while avoiding muscle and strength losses.

I once trained a football player whose team workout consisted of no work for the lower back or hamstrings, the most important muscles for sprint speed. I have another athlete whose school training program is 100% machine based. One of my standout football players, who I began training in eighth grade lost nearly forty pounds in his first year at college because the team workout consisted of full body circuit training of 15-20 reps with 30 seconds rest, three days a week, year round! There must have been some strong guys in that lineup. Another amazing training program was the one that had EVERY kid on the team do the exact same weight regardless of bodyweight, strength level or position! The reasoning behind it was they had 50 kids to train and didn’t have time to change the weights.

To those with a good deal of strength training knowledge the above stories may sound like fiction. But trust me they are all true, you can’t make that kind of stuff up. Unfortunately, I have dozens more and could go on forever with similar stories. There are endless mistakes made by strength coaches and head coaches on a daily basis but here are some of the biggest ones and some ways to improve upon them:

1) Excessive endurance training- Nearly every athlete I work with gets run into the ground on a daily basis. This is counterproductive and is usually done because the coaches don’t have the necessary understanding of the body’s different energy systems and how to train them properly. Most sports require speed. Speed can only be improved through proper training of the nervous system and by avoiding excessive endurance work. Too much distance work can convert fast twitch muscle fibers into slow twitch fibers and can actually decrease an athlete’s speed over time. Unfortunately I’ve seen this happen more times than I care to remember and have watched great athletes have their careers ruined by improper training techniques. If coaches kept in mind the requirements of the sport they are preparing their athletes for, maybe this would not be such a problem. For example, in training an offensive lineman, why would you ever have him run miles at a time or sprint more than ten to twenty yards in practice when you know that he will never run that distance in a game? Unless I am missing something, the point of practice is to get ready for what you will do in a game. The problem, much of the time lies in the fact that head coaches dictate how their team’s running is implemented. Most of the time a head coach does not have a degree in anatomy or physiology or even a general understanding of either. The head coach is required to know the sport inside and out but is rarely an expert in energy system training. If head coaches could check their egos and let a qualified speed and conditioning coach handle this aspect of training they just might add a few more victories to their record.

2) Overtraining- Most coaches have an old school military attitude of “more is better,” and usually end up overtraining their athletes. Spending more than an hour in the weight room is a classic mistake. Performing extra sprints at the end of practice as a form or punishment is another one. By forcing the athletes to run in such a fatigued state, you increase their risk of injury and teach them to adopt improper sprint technique. This combined with three-a-day practices, limited rest times, insufficient nutrition and hydration all leads to a severe state of overtraining.

3) Improper sprint training- Anyone who understands how the body works knows that to improve speed you must target the central nervous system (CNS). Proper neural training requires the appropriate amount of recovery time between sprints. The CNS takes five to six times longer than the muscles to recover, a fact which seem to escape most coaches. Running ten forty yard sprints with a fifteen second rest is not speed training, it is time wasting and nauseating. The frequency of high intensity speed training is also too great. Most athletes are forced to perform maximal sprints every day of the week. The great Olympic sprint coach, Charlie Francis, has his athletes perform no more than two max effort sprint days per week and finds anything more than that to be detrimental in speed development.

4) Too many reps in the weight room- Most of the college weight training programs I see focus on sets of 10-15 reps, even for Olympic lifts. Any strength coach who has yet to learn that Olympic lifts are never to be performed for more than six reps should not be working at the college level. Where is the strength work in these programs? With all of the other endurance work the kids are doing the last thing you want to do is turn the time in the weight room into another endurance session. Focus on strength and speed which is best accomplished by using multiple sets of 1-6 reps and heavy weight.

5) Using the wrong exercises- Tricep kickbacks, leg extensions, and pec deck flyes are all exercises that I have actually seen in the programs of Division 1 schools. These exercises are completely useless for any athlete. Strength is built using basic compound movements and heavy weight. Focus on . Another mistake is taking kids who have little to no training experience and having them do power cleans or some other complex lift. By the time most male athletes reach college they have done a decent amount of weight training but that is not usually the case for females. I have heard of schools taking freshman girls and throwing them right into a workout consisting of snatches and split jerks. Just because a girl may be superstar Division 1 athlete does not mean she is ready to start doing Olympic complexes. Beginners should always train like beginners regardless of the situation.

6) Improper exercise form- Even if you utilize the proper rep scheme, and train heavy on the compound exercises listed above it is all a waste if your exercise form is horrendous. In the college weight rooms I’ve been in, I’ve seen people bench press with their asses a foot and a half off the bench and have seen more varieties of a hang clean than I ever knew existed. As a strength coach it is your job, above all else, to at least be able to teach your athletes proper exercise form and help them avoid injury.

7) Doing conditioning work before weight training- The point of lifting weights is to get stronger. To do so you should be as fresh as possible upon entering the weight room so you can train at your maximal capacity. Running and doing conditioning drills immediately before lifting drains your glycogen stores and saps your energy, leaving you weak and unmotivated, not exactly the way you want to feel before a heavy workout. Completing an exhausting two hour practice and then going straight to the weight room for some heavy squats is also a great way to get injured.
Training the whole team with the same workout- You would be amazed at how many schools use the exact same workout for every player on the team regardless of position, training experience or strength level. When it really gets to be appalling is when the weights to be used on a certain exercise are already written in ahead of time. Some workout sheets will say something like: Bench Press- 3 sets x 10 reps x 225 pounds. So the 150 pound kicker who has never lifted before and the 375 pound nose tackle who has spent his life in the gym are supposed to do the same exact weight. It will staple one of them to the bench and be a joke for the other; even a first grader could tell you that. This is one glaring mistake I will never understand.

9) Never changing the workout- Too many schools use the same workout month after month and year after year. They have an in season program and an off season program and the workouts NEVER change. Every year, for a good laugh, a Division 1 baseball player I train brings me his teams’ workout book at the start of the season. For four years straight, it was the exact same three-day-a-week workout, fifty two weeks a year! Talk about boredom and burn out. I would go absolutely insane if I did the same workout for more than a few weeks straight, never mind four years. If you are getting paid to write workouts for a team, the least you could do is put a little thought into them and add some variety.

10) Constant negativity- After many years working as a strength and conditioning coach I know that most athletes do not respond well to constantly being verbally berated. It is, of course, part of the job, you have to toughen the kids up and earn their respect. But when they hate you and no longer enjoy coming to practice or the weight room, you have ruined what should have been a great experience for them and you have just lowered the performance output of your athletes. I appreciate a hardcore, militant attitude and train most of my athletes in this manner. However we do have fun and lighten up when the work is done. At the end of the day, everyone needs positive reinforcement once in a while or they will just give up or lose interest, it’s human nature, look into it.

The intention of this article was not to bash all college strength coaches and head coaches, because, as I stated earlier there are many great ones. It was simply a way of trying to get through to those that have been stuck in their outdated ways for far too long. Hopefully it opened some eyes and will cause at least a few people to take a step back and rethink their strength and conditioning programs. Properly trained athletes win more games, which as a coach, is always your goal. More importantly, when an 18 year old kid puts his or her athletic future in your hands, it is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. The training you give them over the next four years could literally make or break their careers and shape the rest of their lives. Think about that before heading for the copy machine to rehash the same useless workouts you�ve been using forever.

Medical experts have been saying for years that caffeine acts as a potent diuretic. Consume too many caffeinated beverages, and you end up drinking yourself into dehydration.

But research has not confirmed that notion. Most studies have found that in moderate amounts, caffeine has only mild diuretic effects — much like water.

One report, by a scientist at the University of Connecticut who reviewed 10 previous studies, appeared in June 2002 in The International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism.

Investigations comparing caffeine with water or placebo seldom found a statistical difference in urine volume, the author wrote. “In the 10 studies reviewed, consumption of a caffeinated beverage resulted in 0 to 84 percent retention of the initial volume ingested, whereas consumption of water resulted in 0 to 81 percent retention.”

Another study, in the same journal in 2005, involved scientists following 59 active adults over 11 days while controlling their caffeine intake. They were given caffeine in capsule form on some days and on other days were given a placebo. Researchers found no significant differences in levels of excreted electrolytes or urine volume.

Other recent studies have found similar results.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Caffeine may not be as powerful a diuretic as it’s often said to be.

Last summer one of the brightest young American long-distance running talents to come along in a generation decided to train for his first 26.2-miler. As part of his ramp-up for the New York City Marathon, Dathan “Ritz” Ritzenhein ran a half-marathon tune-up race. He blazed to a 1:01:25 clocking and a third-place finish at the highly competitive Great North Run in England.

Given the fact that he achieved this performance without any taper and with a full month left to take his fitness to peak level for his assault on the Big Apple, Ritz looked set to run perhaps the best debut marathon ever by an American runner.

That’s not what happened. After a strong start—running all the way from Brooklyn to Fifth Avenue with the race leaders—Ritz faded badly in the final miles, crawling through Central Park to a disappointing 11th-place finish in 2:14:04.

This sort of thing happens all the time in distance running, and in triathlon, too. Athletes turn in a highly promising tune-up race performance only to fall flat on their faces a few weeks later in the peak race they really care about. In other words, they peak too soon—or not at all.

Why do endurance athletes, and especially the most competitive endurance athletes, so often mistime their peak? In most cases, I believe, it happens simply because they try to sustain peak-level training too long before their chosen peak race.

A true fitness peak is a delicate and ephemeral thing. Without question, the foundation of a successful peak is a lot of hard work; in fact, achieving a true fitness peak requires that you build your training to the point where you’re working absolutely as hard as you can (without harming yourself) in training.

But that period of maximum work must be very brief, or else your fitness peak will take the form of a great second week of peak-level training or a terrific tune-up race performance instead of goal achievement in your most important race. Competitively minded athletes get into trouble when they too crudely equate fitness with hard work and thus sacrifice quality of hard work for quantity of hard work in their training. (I don’t know whether this was Ritz’s error, and I suspect not, because his coach, Brad Hudson, is a genius. It was probably just a case of marathon inexperience.)

Striking a Balance

Now, I’m sure there are a few competitively minded triathletes who read the preceding paragraph as an argument against hard work. I am not arguing against hard work. To the contrary—I am arguing that you can work even harder, and therefore reach an even higher level of fitness, if you apportion and time your hard work appropriately. The benefit of limiting your peak-level training within the context of the overall training cycle is similar to the benefit of limiting the number of hard training sessions you do within any given week.

If you try to train hard in every workout, you will never be able to train as hard in any single workout as you could if you limited yourself to just a handful of key workouts each week and took it easy in your other sessions. You’ll come out way ahead in the long run if you afford yourself enough recovery between hard workouts to perform at a higher level in those workouts and to adapt more fully in response to each before taking on the next one.

The same principle applies to the full training cycle. Your training workload should be somewhat restrained until you’ve built your fitness to the level where you can really take advantage of a judicious dose of very hard peak-level training. This period of peak-level training should be short enough so that your performances are still improving when you sharply reduce your training workload once more to taper for your peak race. If your peak-level training lasts long enough for your performances to level off, you’re in trouble.

One of the simplest ways triathletes can avoid peaking early and subsequently going stale is to plan two separate fitness peaks per triathlon season—one early and one late. The typical competitive triathlete begins serious base training for the coming triathlon season sometime in January. Those who do are ready for peak-level training by early June but might not race their most important triathlon of the year until August or September. There isn’t a triathlete on earth who can build fitness steadily for seven or eight straight months.

Thus, a more sensible approach is to build fitness through the late winter and spring for a peak race in, say, May or June (or earlier if you started your base training earlier), then start a new training cycle culminating with a peak race in the late summer or early fall.

If you take it easy for a week or 10 days after that early-season peak you can build back up to peak-level training very quickly without much risk of overtraining or going stale. You’ll be able to get away with executing a very short base phase in that later-season training cycle because you will carry over a high level of fitness from the preceding peak. (But it will only work if you take at least a week to recharge the batteries after the first peak.)

The two-peak strategy may be adapted to various race schedules. You could, for example, travel to a warm place for an early-season peak race in April or May and follow it with a longer ramp-up for your late-season peak race, perhaps in October or November.

Whether your late-season peak race is more important than your early-season peak race or vice versa, or whether your early-season training cycle is longer or shorter than your late-season training cycle, the point is to increase your chances of peaking when you want to by dividing the triathlon season into two training cycles and thereby avoiding the common pitfall of trying to sustain peak-level training for too long.

The Three Ingredients of the Perfect Peak

Simply dividing the triathlon season into two separate training cycles will not guarantee that you peak when you want to. The perfect peak has three main ingredients. Be sure to include all three in your training recipe.

1. A Long, Gradual, Restrained Ramp-up
Let me be clear: The fact that competitive endurance athletes often train too long for a peak race—or, more accurately, sustain peak-level training too long before a peak race—should not be taken to indicate that the ideal ramp-up for a peak race is short.

To the contrary, a training cycle should last as long as you can continue to increase your training workload without getting injured or sick. For most triathletes, that’s 18 to 24 weeks, assuming the training cycle begins after an off-season break (hence at a relatively modest base-fitness level). In the case of a late-season training cycle begun at a high level of base fitness following an early-season peak (and a short break), 12 to 16 weeks of increasingly hard training is the limit.

Trying to ramp up to a peak level of training too quickly is no better than trying to sustain peak-level training too long. The way to ensure you are actually able to handle and benefit from the short period of peak training you do at the end of the training cycle is to build your fitness toward that level as slowly as you can without standing still.

A good model for the proper buildup to a perfect fitness peak is the hunting strategy that tigers use. If a tiger spends, say, one hour hunting an antelope, the first 59 minutes of the process consist of creeping through tall grass unnoticed to get as close to the prey as possible. The final sprint chase and catch lasts only a minute. While that dramatic final chase may seem like the most important part of the hunt, those 59 preceding minutes of restrained sneaking forward are really no less important, because they lay the groundwork for a successful catch.

The base and build phases of triathlon training are like that first stage of a tiger’s hunt. Patience and restraint are the watchwords as you gradually build your fitness to a level where you are able to pounce and really take advantage of peak-level training. Starting your peak-level training too soon is like a tiger starting his sprint too soon and bonking before he can catch his dinner, or rushing the sneaking-up process and warning the antelope of his presence before he’s within striking distance. Your peak phase of training should be a late, quick strike that takes advantage of all the work you’ve done up to that point.

2. Race-specific Peak Workouts
Your peak phase of training typically should last six to eight weeks, including your taper. During this phase, perform key workouts (in all three triathlon disciplines) that are highly race-specific, meaning they challenge your ability to sustain your goal race pace in swimming, cycling and running.

For each of us there is one week of race-specific triathlon training that represents the heaviest workload (workload = training volume x average training intensity) we can handle at our current stage of athletic development without destroying ourselves. When you plan a training cycle, you should have a solid sense of what that peak week should entail given your training history, present fitness level and goals. Schedule your peak week as the last week of training before you start your taper; in other words, make it the second-to-last or third-to-last week of training before race day.

Exactly one week of training at that peak level will suffice to enable you to race at your peak performance level. The mistake many competitive triathletes make is to hit this level of training many weeks before their peak race and then sustain it, which all but guarantees that they leave their peak performance out on the roads and in the pool.

While your peak phase of training may last as long as eight weeks, and while all eight weeks of this phase can and ought to be very challenging (except for one or two recovery weeks), only that final pre-taper week should constitute a no-holds-barred effort to absorb the absolute maximum workload you can at this stage of your triathlon career.

3. An Extreme Taper
The third ingredient of a successful peak, which many competitive triathletes also have trouble executing, is an extreme pre-race taper: that is, a drastic reduction in training volume in the final week to two weeks of training. A lot of triathletes train more or less as normal until one day before their peak race, then take that last day off and call it a taper. Twenty-four hours later they wonder why they feel totally flat in the moment of truth.

The problem, of course, is that it is very difficult for the training-addicted competitive athlete to truly accept the idea that rest can be beneficial for performance. Everyone understands this fact intellectually, but only a small minority of competitive triathletes embrace it emotionally, which is the only thing that matters when it comes to actually acting on this knowledge.

I was turned onto the practice of extreme tapering by a fortunate accident. A cross-country business trip forced me to curtail and cancel several workouts during the week preceding a half-marathon running race. Irrationally, I viewed this enforced extreme taper as a setback and arrived at the starting line wracked by the insane fear that I had lost fitness in the preceding several days. My personal best half-marathon at the time was 1:17:59. My goal was to run in the 1:16s. I ran 1:13:31. I have been an extreme taperer ever since.

Exercise scientists have performed numerous studies demonstrating the physiological benefits of tapering and comparing the effectiveness of different tapering protocols. It’s all very interesting, but it boils down to common sense.

When you cut way back on your training in the last week to two weeks before you race, your body gets a chance to fully adapt to all the hard training you’ve done and to rest up for race day. You should do more or less the same number and types of workouts during your taper as you did in the peak training week that preceded it, but progressively slash the duration of each workout.

The longer your peak race is and the higher your maximum training workload was, the longer your taper should be. A four- to five-day taper is adequate for low-volume trainers peaking for a sprint triathlon. High-volume trainers peaking for an Ironman should taper for two full weeks.

Following is an example of how your final two weeks of training for a peak Olympic-distance triathlon might look if you train according to my recommendations—and supposing you normally train on a weekly schedule of three swims, three rides and three runs per week. The final workout is a very short, very high-intensity bike session designed to trigger a muscle glycogen sponging effect that you can take advantage of by eating lots of carbohydrates in the final 24 hours before your race.

Two-week Peak-training Schedule

Peak Week

Monday

• Off

Tuesday

• Swim: 2,800 yards — Main set: 4 x 100 sprint; 4 x 400 @ 1.5K race pace
• Bike: 40 minutes @ 40K race pace (80 min. total)

Wednesday

• Tempo run: 30 min. @ 10K race pace (50 min. total)

Thursday

• Swim: 2,400 yards — Main set: 8 x 200 race-start simulation (100 sprint/100 @ 1.5K race pace)
• Bike: 1 hour easy with 6 x 20-sec. accelerations

Friday

• Run: 40 min. easy + 6 x 20-sec. strides

Saturday

• Ascending long bike: 2 hrs. (Increase pace every 20 min., last 20 min. @ 40K race pace)

Sunday

• Steady-state run: 60 min., with 40 min. @ marathon race pace
• Swim: 2,200 yds. @ Ironman race pace

Race Week

Monday

• Off

Tuesday

• Swim: 1,600 yards — Main set: 4 x 100 sprint; 2 x 400 @ 1.5K race pace
• Bike: 20 min. @ 40K race pace (40 min. total)

Wednesday

• Tempo run: 15 min. @ 10K race pace (25 min. total)

Thursday

• Swim: 1,200 yards — Main set: 4 x 200 race-start simulation (100 sprint/100 1.5K race pace)
• Bike: 30 min. easy with 6 x 20-sec. accelerations

Friday

• Run: 15 min. easy plus 6 x 20-sec. strides

Saturday

• Glycogen-loading bike workout: (10-min warm-up; 2.5 min. @ 95 percent max power; 30 sec. @ max power, 10-min. cool-down)

Sunday

• Race

===========================================

The B$ factor explodes this time of year; wicked fulminations of unadulterated bovine excrement are disgorged, exciting the masses. Myths are created, lies are spewed and the marketing that festered all year in the advertising cesspool, may now be leeching into your television set, internet, radio, billboards, magazines, competitive events, newspapers, buses, windows of mini-vans (as tax write-offs) and anywhere, where messaging may be promulgated.

I am fully in support of creative advertising methods and stimulating marketing concepts, it’s become a bit of an art, Andy Warhol notwithstanding. For all of you who made a New Years resolution a couple months ago, centered on weight loss, exercise increase or breaking a vice, here are just a few prevaricators to avoid:

Jenny Craig

Jenny Craig is one of the good players in the mastodonic weight reduction racket. However; the nicest of the scammers, is still a scammer.

Their whole pitch is based on the benefits of no work somehow nets results. They hook victims up as members, for a fee, plus the cost of food.

Recently while browsing their website I discovered that for as low as $6 per month, plus the cost of food, you too may be accepted in the fold of the gullible and wretched.

There is mention of not changing your lifestyle, by doing it the Jenny way.

There is a quote promising, “with Jenny Craig you don’t have to be a celebrity to look like one, this, below a picture of a newly emaciated and blonde Kirstie Alley, a celeb, no less.

She is not necessarily healthy, because she is thinner. I bet good food after bad, she cannot run to the limo much faster than when she was obese. That was her problem, lifestyle that’s how she got obese to begin with.

So it is safe to assume that if her lifestyle did not change, it must be liposuction and a round of ‘how do ya do’ with the bronzed pool boy, which resulted in her weight reduction.

The pool boy action does count as exercise!

Jenny Craig does provide an aggressive caloric reduction regime, which is possibly a good idea; balancing the percentages of fats, proteins and carbohydrates. In principle it has potential.

I noticed no mention of whole foods and the circumstance that they provide a supply of necessary vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants that the prepackaged foods JC require you to purchase (some in advance) cannot possibly provide. There is not a mere utterance about good and bad cholesterol at least not that I could identify.

The visually challenged sheep continue to be sightless, yet somehow aren’t wary of the grinning shepherd perched upon the grassy knoll.

Lastly the Jenny Craig automaton assigned to counsel you through your weight reduction program is not necessarily a registered dietitian, she is trained by Jenny Craig, the company.

Tip: Put down the doughnuts and ding dongs and take a walk.

Atkins Diet

Atkins Diet is another of the gregarious bovine leavings to avoid.

To me it is as medically fraudulent as popping pseudoephedrine for weight loss purposes. If you are that lazy, seducing the canine may become just slightly more agitating.

Picture a fat guy, jittery on the couch, missing the enter button on the remote…click…click….click…channel 999…

The Atkins Diet requires you to restrict all carbohydrates.

What if THAT isn’t your problem?

What if you eat whale carcasses in front of the television; how is that going to help you? What if you pop a protein and fat rich (good fat) peanut every time you blink?

12 blinks per minute x 60 minutes per hour x 24 hours a day = 17,280 blinks per day. Give or take a blink. THIS IS A PRODIGOUS QUANTITY OF PEANUTS!

Where is the education?

When restricting ALL carbohydrates, you are restricting many vitamins, minerals, antioxidants sources of fiber and micro nutrients necessary for good health, which are bountifully supplied in fresh fruit and vegetables.

Atkins sells their own line of food, lovingly prepared and packaged as ‘Advantage’, as if their food is better than the way nature made it.

Atkins died an obese man.

Curves for Women

Okay this at least is a decent program, but again requires membership and ongoing payments in addition to the original start up fee.

Curves require you to exercise for 30 minutes per workout, using various machines quickly, with the objective of keeping the heart rate up. I like this however, there is a shortcoming:

30 minutes of steady exercise requires the energy output to maybe burn through a small handful of trail mix. This is not enough; especially as one becomes fitter!

There are phases to the diet, which are explained shortly after parolee is informed that this is a program where you don’t have to experience a lifestyle change.

Well, which way is it going to be then?

Lifestyle change is precisely what most people need; to not sit on the couch from 7 to 10 pm, eating chips and whale carcasses.

I would suggest Curves for a person who has never exercised and never watched their diet, for one year then move on…graduate to something real, like Bootcamp!

Herbal Magic

What a name! ‘Herbal Magic’.

Okay pull a rabbit out of a hat and make Oprah Winfrey stay thin or stay plump, but stay. Good luck with that hat-trick, you’ll need it.

Here is a quote from the herbal magician’s website, where they utilize healthy manifestations of pseudo, post-modern pagans…

The natural herbal supplements, vitamins, and minerals used throughout your weight management program help you maintain lean body mass, resulting in a healthy appearance and more efficient metabolism. When combined with sensible eating habits and proper lifestyle changes, our specially designed formulations will help:

Let’s dissect this paragraph for a moment, shall we?

‘the natural herbal supplements, vitamins and minerals….’

Natural is precisely what they are not! Vitamins and minerals morph from their state of natural to unnatural, during the phase of manufacturing to becoming a supplement for packaging, never mind the grotesque concept of popping pills to solve a lifestyle issue.

‘resulting in a healthy appearance…’

Elite athletes drop dead on occasion, they too appear(ed) healthy (RIP), but inside they may be a single LDL deposit away from cardiac arrest or some disgusting, inveterate addiction.

‘when designed with proper lifestyle changes…’

Okay, finally one of these charlatans admits that the wretched and forsaken need a lifestyle change. Is it now time to put down the whale carcass and take a walk, yet? Have we advanced beyond the snake oil salesman grandstanding on the back of a flatbed?

Of course these illusionists pedal their own wares. Check out some solid opinion here on their scam-not-scam-magic-not-magic-scam.

Shannon W has this to say and asks for comments: http://www.dietfraud.com/Dietcraze/scams_herbalmagic.html

“Crazy isn’t it? The initial start up with their starter kit was $1200, they are very pushy and I thought I had to buy the starter kit, for an extra 350, which is a total rip off, for a canvas bag some bars and a few other things, total rip off, the 800 start up fee is for their support you have to go in 3x a week. Anyways, it costs 57 a week for the pills and an additional 30 a month for the rest of the pills,”

A little uncommon sense can go a long way to better health. There are no secret formulas, shortcuts or magic pills to forgive your vices of couch surfing and irresponsible eating.

The medical industry may not thank you, but your friendly neighborhood taxpayer will.

The diet fraud-not fraud racket is estimated to be a growing $40 billion dollar industry in the US.

Red Bull. That stuff really gives you wings, man. It’s not the nugget of nutritional advice you might have expected from an Ironman World Champion. But Chris McCormack insists it’s what finally pushed him over the finish line to win the Hawaii event – the most gruelling athletic test in the world of sport. McCormack was on the island this week along with Xterra off-road triathlon ace Melanie McQuaid to give a series of clinics and talks to local athletes and youngsters.

Aussie McCormack finally achieved his dream of winning the 2.4mile swim, 112 mile bike and marathon at Kona last year, after six years of trying, completing the course in eight hours, 15 minutes and 34 seconds. If it’s possible to imagine anything more extreme than that. Then Xterra triathlon is it. It’s not as far. A breezy Olympic distance (1.5k/40k/10k) triathlon. The catch is it’s all off-road – ocean swimming, mountain biking and trail running.

The Hawaii event – held on Maui – features more than 3,000 feet of climbing on the bike and run up the lava strewn slopes of the dormant Haleakala Volcano.

McQuaid, a former pro mountain biker from British Columbia, has won it three times.

The pair sat down with James Whittaker this week to share some of the wisdom that helped make them champions.

BDA Sun: Tell us a little bit about your training schedules

Melanie McQuaid: It depends on how much travel I need to do. If I’m at home I do 20-30 hours a week, biking, running, time in the weight room, yoga, stretching.

About 65 per cent of the work I do is on the bike. It’s not all in the mountains, I do about 60 per cent of that on the road. You push bigger gears on a road bike.

Mountain biking is really hard on your body so it takes more time to recover.

Chris McCormack: As you get older you get smarter. I used to be a quantative person. So many athletes think there is this magic number of miles you have got to do. In my biggest career week I swam 35k, rode 1,000k and ran 110k. I was very much caught up in this belief that you have to do more, more, more. Over the years I’ve finessed what works for me and now I do more like 15-20k in the pool, 600k on the bike and 80k running each week.

BDA Sun: Any training tips for amateur athletes?

MM: You want to focus on maximizing your strengths and minimizing your weaknesses,

If you focus on that you’ll maintain your strengths and chip away at your weaknesses. I don’t know anyone who ever achieves their full potential. There are three sports to improve in.

In an eight hour race, even in a three hour race, there’s so many things can happen. Even if you win there’s always something you could have done better

CM: That’s the addiction. It’s the battle that keeps you in it. Every time you race, you ask yourself – ‘what could I have done better?”

When you stop asking yourself that question it’s time to hang up your boots.

Every failure you can take and use it and say I need to do this or that better next year.

Every athlete is striving for that perfect race and I don’t think it ever happens. I don’t even know how to define it.

BDA Sun: Chris, have you ever tried the off-road triathlons?

CM: I did it one year in Hawaii and I lost 30 minutes on the bike from my normal Olympic distance time.

MM: I think I overtook you

CM: The descent on the bike is called the plunge. It’s a vertical drop, plus the people in-front of you kicked up so much dust you could hardly see where you were going and the rocks are razor sharp. If you drop the bike it’s going to hurt.

You see these people coming back and saying ‘that was unreal’ and they’re covered in cuts and bruises. They’re ripped to shreds.

I’d love to switch but I’m not talented enough on a mountain bike.

BDA Sun: What’s the appeal, Melanie, can you explain that?

MM: It’s different and there is risk involved. That’s what’s interesting about Xterra (off road triathlons). Every race is not a set distance. In Hawaii you’re basically racing on lava. It’s rocky and you have to have good bike handling skills. Other times you can be racing in mud.

There is some risk to it. That’s what makes the sport exciting. There’s no reward without risk.

Everybody’s got good bike handling skills, so it becomes very tactical. How much do you let it go on the descent?

BDA Sun: How did you get into it?

MM: I raced the World Cup as a mountain biker so I already had those skills. I was good at racing mountain bikes and thought I’d be a good triathlete too – it’s a sport that rewards a good cyclist.

I also like the fact that you get to see a lot of nature – going to different places where you can really get a good feel for the environment.

BDA Sun: You are also here to talk about nutrition. What’s the key to eating right for an athlete?

MM: I think it’s basically 80-20. If 80 per cent of everything you’re eating is the right thing. Breakfast is good, lunch is good, dinner is good. It allows some room in your diet for the things you enjoy. You can’t just swing from junk food one week to a boring diet the next, there has to be balance.

More vegetables and less sugar is one of my main themes.

BDA Sun: What about you Chris. What gets you through an Ironman?

CM: Red Bull. That stuff gives you wings, man. I had worked with all these scientists and nutritionists and they had designed this plan for the race. They told me no caffeine.

I ran the worst race of my life. I almost gave up on the run, till one of the other guys told me to grab a coke.

After that it was caffeine at every stop. Now for the last seven miles all I drink is Red Bull.

BDA Sun: You don’t often hear people recommending Red Bull. What does the caffeine do?

CM: In a race that long it’s neurological. You start to drift with your mind but you need to stay focused. You want to disassociate a little bit because you want the time to go quickly. But it’s when you go over to the dark side of the force that it becomes a problem.

You need to stay alert mentally and focus on the little things, caffeine helps with that.

BDA Sun: How do you stay focused Melanie?

MM: The terrain is so rocky you can’t take your mind off it. You have to pay attention the whole time or you’ll fall over.

It’s maximum gas the whole way through.

The best race is when you’re completely focused, nothing else comes into your mind.

With XTerra you break it up into a swim, bike and run and you do each at full pace – as fast as you can. I race at about 195bpm,

You swim, 1500m at your top speed. On the bike, the whole race in Hawaii is to the top of the hill – then the descent into the finish line.

You can’t take a drink on the descent.

Then you have to go and run the fastest 12k you can. You have to think I haven’t swam, I haven’t biked, it’s all about the run.

BDA Sun: There’s obviously a lot of mind games involved. In what situations do you go over to the ‘dark side’?

CM: If you’re a front-runner, like I used to be, that’s a demon that can affect your race.

You don’t know what’s behind you. You are the hunted.

The anguish of being in front is you don’t know what’s going on in the race. If I’m hunting someone, I’m getting the splits, I’m constantly being fed information, I know what I have to do.

If you’re in front you only have to let the doubts creep in for a second and it can upset your whole race.

Norman Stadler (one of McCormack’s biggest Ironman rivals) is a front runner and one of the biggest weapons I have against him is to try and make him doubt himself. I play the mind games, I feed it through the press, on my website. People think it’s arrogance but this is real for me. If you create a doubt that can give you a tiny advantage on the course then it’s worth it.

MM: When you’re racing that hard. Everybody’s got the years of experience – everybody’s got good technical skills, everybody’s put in the training.

If you have a mental advantage it can make a difference. Even if it’s one per cent it can make a difference.

Anyone who’s been on a treadmill and tried to run just one kilometre knows it’s never your body that’s stopping you. It’s in your mind.

Any sport – Ironman, Xterra, tennis… It comes down to how strong your mind is.

BDA Sun: Any final words of wisdom?

MM: I would say it’s important to set goals and to constantly re-assess them as that will keep you motivated and focused.

CM: Be Patient. Sport makes you deal with failures a lot more than success but there’s really no such thing as failure just learning experiences that you can reflect on to help you improve the next time.