Weblogic

The picture to the left is of Sarah (my wife) at Ironman Canada this year (2008).  It was one of her toughest days to date.  I explain a little more about that below.

Last week I asked Jen Annet to provide myself with a testimonial.   I try and gather testimonials for the athlete’s I help for a variety of reasons.   Primarily though, I like to show how one person has used coaching so that others can see a real-life example of how a coach can benefit them.  Here is what Jen had to say:

“IMC 2008 was an incredible first time experience for me. I started training almost a year in advance and as many athletes do, found myself in a repetitive rut by spring. Fortunately, through a friend, I met up with Scott who re-vamped my training schedule. We spent a couple of hours going through the specifics of each day and how to build each week without burning myself out. This worked great for me as it completely re-challenged my body while working around my full time work schedule. I followed the plan fairly closely and could feel how much stronger I was getting each month. All that hard work and dedication paid off as I finished IMC this year in 10:34:14, placing first in my age category and earning a spot to go to Hawaii!”

Thanks,

Jen

I thought I would share this testimonial because it has to do with a topic that has been on my mind lately.  As Jen said herself, she was training for a long period of time and found herself in a rut come spring.  Certainly not uncommon amongst athlete’s who are very motivated.  In the consultation we went over in some detail on how to prevent over reaching.  

I prefer the term over reaching to over training since by definition over training is a rather large decrease in training performance over a substantial amount of time that can also coincide with other medical issues.  It is pretty hard to become overtrained and physically ill for months from it.  If you have time though you can google for some examples with Peter Reid and Clas Bjorling.  I am sure there are others but those come to mind. 

Over reaching to me is training in a way that fatigue is preventing you from getting stronger and faster.  So either you are training too hard or are not recovering enough or a combination of both.  This is much more common with age groupers.  And of course I have experienced it.  Sometimes you need to push your limits to really see what works best for you.  Sarah, my lovely wife, who I also coach over reached recently.   She writes a great blog and she shares such experiences. 

As a coach, I do my best to prevent this happening to my athlete’s.  However, no matter what I do, ultimately it comes down to the athlete knowing and paying attention to the cues.  Unfortunately I did not see it happening to Sarah and she was simply ignoring cues that she was over doing it.  In all fairness to Sarah though...she dramatically changed her career and time commitments last summer.  It was a big change in a relatively short amount of time.  She could no longer do the hours of hard training she used to and I think this caught her by surprise.

As I mentioned above, I went over in some detail on what Jen should watch out for.  However, one of the biggest and simplest cues you should pay attention to is whether or not you can put out a significant mod-hard effort.  Unless you are in a camp like week where you have ample recovery time before and afterwards, you should always be able to do a significant amount of mod-hard work.  This is the MOD-HARD RULE.

If you can’t, then you should do a few days of really light training and maybe even take a day or two off.  For example, you should not do an Ironman pace ride (steady) if you don’t have the legs to go mod-hard.  Likewise for swimming and running.  If you do, you are simply digging a bigger hole and preventing yourself from getting faster. 

[Note: Review this link on training zones if you are not familiar with my terminology.]

Today I prematurely launched myself back into some hard training.  We did a local 100km team time trial (little over 60miles).  It was pretty fun.  I was lucky to have 3 strong team members and we took the win for the inaugural event.  Nonetheless, my legs are pretty shaky and I do not imagine I will be putting out any mod hard efforts any time soon.