Intervals aren't Funny

Interval Training
Intervals are painful. Your legs muscles will strain until they turn to rubber. Your lungs will whistle as you pull air into your chest. After the first two sprints, your legs will weaken and threaten to rebel during each acceleration, requiring you to force yourself forward with your mind as much as your calves. And that’s all before the nausea settles into your guts and tries to evict whatever tenants arrived during your last meal.

Intervals are also the most powerful weapon in your arsenal for improving performance. A six week interval rotation will measurably lower your average pace by several seconds. It will also put a powerful kick into your weaponry, allowing you to accelerate through the last quarter-mile of your next race, leaving your competition in a puddle of shame and tears.

I have a weekly interval group run which starts and finishes at my house on Wednesday evenings. Eight of us bound out of the neighborhood like a New Kids reunion video, trotting down to the bay to kick into our interval patterns. I’m proud to say that we no longer run until someone vomits, but I’ve spent more than one late night in the bathroom with a good book and a garbage can.

Intervals build speed by training your mind and body to run harder. In a nutshell…you have to run faster in order to run faster.

Here is my three phase plan for interval training.
Definitions:
Speed percentages (%) - all speeds/paces are given as a percentage of your own maximum speed; the maximum speed that you can maintain for a half mile interval.

Phase One: Interval Base (6 Weeks x 1 workout/week)
Find a half-mile of uninterrupted pavement. Your goal is to train your body to conduct intervals, concentrating upon your form and cadence. This basing phase is critical to avoiding injury as you progress towards the more difficult phases of interval training.
· Jog 1 half-mile to warm up.
· Stretch your legs and relax your mind. Take a few deep breaths, and…
· Run 1 interval at about 70% of your maximum speed.
· Rest for 2 minutes
· Run your second interval at 80%
· Rest and repeat for 3 more intervals
· Run your last interval with everything you have in the tank, but maintaining proper form.
· Jog one interval and cool down with light stretching.

Phase Two: Interval Training (6 Weeks x 1-2 workouts/week)
· Jog 1-2 miles at a comfortable pace
· Interval Sequence (start with 6 and continue until you can run 10)
o 1 Minute at 80%
o 1 Minute rest interval
· Cool down jog
· Last 500 meters- accelerate and finish at 80% of maximum speed

Phase Three: Interval Training (10 Weeks x 1 workout/week)
· Jog 1-2 miles at a comfortable pace
· Interval sequence (start with 3 and continue until you can reach your goal. My goal is 4 sets)
o 3 Minutes at 80%
o 2 Minutes jogging for rest interval
· Cool down jog
· Last mile- accelerate to 80% of your maximum pace and leave everything on the road.

As your next race approaches, drop intervals from your training so that you can taper. I eliminate intervals from my schedule for the two weeks before any event.

Interval Tips:
1. Don’t sprint through your first fast interval. Odds are, you’ll bonk out before you finish your workout. Run your intervals consistently at 80% of your maximum speed. If you have extra gas in the tank, then burn it off in your cool-down leg and plan for faster intervals on your next workout.
2. Concentrate on a quick running cadence. This will keep your foot strike under your center of gravity. If you lengthen your stride, then you are using your fast-twitch, power muscles, which will burn out in minutes, not hours. A quick cadence trains your body to maintain a high heart rate and improves your aerobic capacity. That’s the key result of interval training and will translate into faster pacing for your next 10K or marathon.
3. Evening and nighttime interval workouts can interfere with your sleep pattern. It takes considerably longer to “come down” from the intensity of interval training. The good news is that your legs and body will have a wonderful, warm and relaxed feeling.
4. Monitor for injuries- Interval training is tough on the body. Watch for soreness in the soles of your feet. This will occur due to the increased strain that you put on your arches in the sprinting. If the soreness doesn’t dissipate, then take a couple of ibuprophen and a week off. Your heels are the other trouble spot. Be careful with your form and monitor your heels for bruising. If you experience tenderness that doesn’t fade after a day, then take a week off.
5. Concentrate upon your rest intervals. It is not only the sprint intervals that control the quality of your training. You will gain more by focusing upon your rest intervals, ensuring that you run your sprints with enough discipline that you are able to (barely) manage to hold a 60% pace on your rest cycles. This is where you make your money in interval training.
6. How do you know you’re ready to move to the next phase? When you can complete the sequence and comfortably maintain your rest pace at 50-60 percent of your maximum.Measure success by the gradual increase in distance covered through the intervals. As the weeks go by, you’ll notice that you run farther through your sequence; until you move to the next phase and start again.

I Buy a Bike Trainer

I bought a Kurt Kinetic trainer for my bike last week and set it up in the back room. (www.kurtkinetic.com) The instructions were easy and it took less than 15 minutes to mount my Specialized Allez road bike, setting it up facing the windows with a nice view of the pool. I’ve debated this investment for a long time. In the end, the reasons were overwhelming (translation: my wife wanted the trainer)
· Weather- I don’t like running my bike on wet roads because the dirt and grime wear on the expensive moving parts. In Florida, this causes me more than a little grief, due to all the freak’in geezers who have their sprinklers pointed at the road.
· Safety- There’s an obvious geezer reference here, but it’s really the newspaper guy that is the most dangerous foe on my morning workout. He almost took my life. About two years ago, I found myself head to head with a 10-year old Mitsubishi, reenacting the scene from Top Gun where Goose and Maverick go nose-to-nose with Viper over the desert floor, swerving at the last minute to avoid imminent death and maneuver for a missile shot and dinner with Kelly McGillis. My experience was the same, except the Mitsubishi driver had his dome light on and was driving from the passenger seat. Also, when I “broke right,” I crashed through two azalea bushes and a metal garbage can. It sounded like Animal, from the Muppets, beating his head on his cymbals. The newspaper guy never noticed, so he most likely has no clue why I scream at him and throw loose change whenever our paths cross.
· My wife can train- Actually, I don’t’ care about this, but it helped justify the cost of the trainer, thus preventing another expensive item from landing on the “toys for daddy” list which seems to count against me. Having a training tool for both my wife and I has proven more of a hindrance than a help. I’m forever adjusting the seat to her size and changing the pedals. Apparently, she can’t do these things. Apparently she isn’t sure how high to put the seat, and the pedals screw in the wrong way, and she’s suddenly afraid that she’ll scratch my bike, and…and…and she’s weak and math is hard. Whatever.
· I don’t need long, straight roads- I bike so that I can run triathlons. Therefore, I need long, uninterrupted stretches to work on my time trial strength. With the trainer I can put my head down, turn up some music on the Iphone, and rip out some miles without worrying about traffic, stop lights, or intersections.
To this point, the only bad thing about the indoor trainer is the lack of scenery. However, I can offset this by watching movies on my computer and listening to music. Judging from my heart monitor’s readings, an hour on the trainer is equal to about eighty minutes on the road. Of course that 20 minute advantage costs a couple of hundred dollars, but who can put a price on good health; or on getting to watch my wife spinning in her tight cycling shorts while I eat a turkey sandwich and drink a beer at the kitchen counter. Nice.

Stay Cool tips for Summer Running

Summer in St Pete is hot. Each morning brings a delicate, balanced race from the front door to my truck for the ride to work, with the precious goal of crossing the driveway, climbing into my Tacoma, and getting the air conditioning fired up before I sweat through my shirt. It’s a tougher race than you think. Not an Ironman by any stretch, but it still requires a delicate strategy; move too fast and I break a sweat, too slow and the heat and humidity starts pulling my bodily fluids through my pores, transforming my crisp ironed shirt into a limp, wrinkled rag. Once in the frigid a.c. blasts through the vents, bringing a shiver from my sweat-clammy skin, I grit my teeth and slide my sunglasses onto my nose, hoping that the plastic doesn’t sear to my face.
Running in the summer is tough. Each degree above 80 degrees takes about 5 seconds off my pace in a 10-mile run. Years of struggling to get good workouts in the summer heat has led me to create this list of hot weather tips.
Hydration is the key, and you can’t do it two hours before you run. You only absorb about a quart an hour; the rest just turns your pee clear and waters someone’s yard on your route. Sip water the night before you run, and during the day after you run. It’s easier to stay hydrated than to get hydrated.
Drink early and often. I carry a Nathan belt (http://www.nathansports.com/) I find that it is more secure than the Fuelbelt models, which tend to bounce around on my waist. I drink a few ounces each mile. It’s better to be hydrated early, even if I run out of water in the last mile or two. If I try to stretch my water, then I dehydrate, bonk, and all that’s left is a long walk back to the house.
Stage water: on long runs, I hide a water bottle, or two, on a small bridge in the Bay. I drop off the bottles on the way out, and retrieve them on the return leg, replenishing my supply while avoiding carrying the weight.
If I’m in a race, and they hand out wet towels, then I run with the towel on my head or on the back of my neck. The body loses a great deal of heat in these areas, making them the prime cooling zones.
Dump the heart-rate monitoring strap unless you need it. On long summer runs, I leave the strap for my heart-rate monitor at home unless I am on a specific workout that requires the monitor. The strap’s plastic body holds a lot of heat. If you don’t believe me, take it off while running on a hot day. It’ll feel like a cold breeze shot up your shirt.
I also have some cool down tricks that I use to get my body back to normal temperatures. I discovered these techniques after years of showering, cooling down, and then feeling my body warm up during the post-run hour, resulting in another soaked, wrinkled shirt and several miserable, uncomfortable hours at work.
Ice: I use sandwich bags of ice under my armpits when I have to cool down in a hurry. Not pleasant, but extremely effective.
Frozen grapes: I keep sandwich bags of frozen grapes in the freezer. Pop a few in your mouth and they serve as a cooling, healthy snack.
It’s tough to get a solid workout in the heat. Hopefully, these tips help you. I’ll be using these and more in 17 days, when I run a half-Ironman in the blistering misery of central Florida. Should be fun, at least until I vomit the first time.

Ran 13-miles today, stopping at the St Pete pier while the sun rose over the mirror-smooth water. As I filled my water bottles, feeling a peculiar one-ness with mankind, a large guy passed me, heading into the ladies room. "That's the women's room, dude," I said, whereby the big dude turned around and I discovered that "he" was a she. I jogged away, head hung low, leaving my sense of community lying in the droplets of seagull poop.

29 Days until the Florida Challenge Triathlon.
Time to experiment with my nutrition. This always makes me nervous but I have no choice. Maybe it’s the result of the aging process, but I can no longer “gut” out 2.5 hours on the bike and still have gas in the tank to launch into my half marathon run. With less than a month left until the Florida Challenge, I realize that my usual race diet of Sport Beans and caffeinated gels isn’t enough. As I cross into the last 30 minutes of my bike rides, I can’t keep enough fast-fuel glucose in my system without overshooting, which pushes a jittery rush of sugar into my blood vessels and leads to a coma-like bonk within minutes. More than once, I’ve had to pull up from my run and walk back to the house, holding my head low with humility while clenching my jaw with rage. I do not want to bonk in the race. It’ll be a long enough day without spending half of it surfing the blood-sugar wave crests and crashing through troughs of suicidal depression. I’ll save that for when Julie watches “Dances with the Stars.”
I’ve bonked enough before to know that nutrition on race day makes as much of a difference as your training. Or, more accurately, your training enables you to perform; your nutrition plan will determine whether you do perform. When I ran Ironman Florida back in ’02, I carried a bottle of flat Coca-cola in my belt for the marathon leg. At mile 22, I drank every drop and felt like superman right up until mile 24, at which point the wheels came off and I managed to crawl to the finish at about the pace of a migrating glacier. I rallied for the last 20 yards and ran to look good for the cameras.
The longer the race, the more impact your nutrition plan will have upon ultimate success or failure. You can gut out some hunger pangs in a 10K, but when you cross the threshold into Olympic-distance Tri’s and marathons your margin of error diminishes. My theory is that I’m not getting enough protein or fat. The problem is that my stomach gets pretty sensitive after 90 minutes of exercise in the heat. Orange flavored Sport Beans have been my staple for years. After I hit mile 11, I start putting a sport bean or two in my mouth and letting them dissolve. Until now, that’s always worked pretty well. Now I have to find something more substantial that I can get into my stomach. I figure I’ll try a smoothie Powerbar tomorrow and see how that works. I’ll eat it half-way through my 12 mile run, when I’m convenient located near the Vinoy and St Pete Pier bathrooms. If it sticks, then I’ll give it a try on my long brick next Friday. Hopefully, it will provide balance to my diet plan and let me keep ingesting Sport Beans through the run. Otherwise, I’ll be sitting in a public crapper ejecting everything else in my stomach. At least there’s a coffee shop at the Vinoy.

Dave wins the Old Northeast neighborhood Super Jock Trophy!!!

A new cold war has heated up in St. Pete, firing the simmering coals of competitive intensity between my triathlon training partner and I. Until this Sunday morning, we were neighbors with a shared interest in remaining healthy and providing solid examples for our respective children. Until Sunday morning. Until Dave made our competition real by choosing to unveil a shiny trophy he ordered, adorned with a plaque that proclaimed the holder to be the Old Northeast Neighborhood Super Jock. Six inches of gleaming, polished plastic perched on a base of faux marble. I mean, really, think about it. Providing an example of healthy living to our kids is sort of noble, but this is a trophy; something to be proud of!

Dave and I ran the Top Gun Triathlon as the inaugural event in the Super Jock competition. Actually, Dave ran the triathlon; I hobbled along as fast as my “butter tart-fuel buttocks could jiggle through the swim, bike, and run. (more on butter tarts soon) Dave ran a phenomenal triathlon and placed 7th. I placed a respectable 29th, which would have made me quite happy had I not spent the entire hour and eleven minutes aware that Dave was beating me like the family mule. Dave managed to beat me by 2 minutes on the swim alone, a remarkable achievement as the swim only took me ten minutes. Overall, he bested me by 8 minutes. But I’m not concerned. There’s a trophy involved now. Pride has been awakened. Things will change. Meals skipped, runs longer, sleep ignored, swim form perfected, cycling technique strengthened. My waist will be smaller, my diet more fibrous, my waste more loose.

We celebrated Dave’s win with our first trophy ceremony after the race. I handed the trophy over to a conciliatory, smiling Dave with a handshake as a nearby spectator snapped a couple of pictures. I tried to be sincere, but my smile masked the turning gears of a formulating, redemptive plan. By 3pm, I had Dave talked into the Longleaf Olympic distance triathlon. While I completed the on-line registration for the race, I browsed some prices on new triathlon wheels for my bike. I think this trophy could become expensive, but that’s okay. The kids can take their chances in public school. That will save me some time reviewing homework so I can train harder.