What did you do on the 4th?

Well I hope your 4th was as good as mine. It started with perfect weather, you just could not ask for a nicer day, lots of sunshine, 85 degrees and little humidity makes for a perfect summer day. I rode the firecracker ride, a charity ride that I have done a couple of years now. Best part, as always are the people, I am so lucky to have such good friends who share my passion of Triathlon and most of them showed even after racing a full Ironman just a week ago. Sometimes I think these people are just super human, they are certainly super people! After training very hard myself through the winter and spring I am now getting close to my second Ironman race in Louisville and I was due for a much needed recovery week. My recovery week consist of a LOT less volume of training, probably 30% of what I normally do as well as less intensity. I was already starting to feel much better after starting this on Monday of this week and doing nothing for two days. (I had been hitting it pretty hard and the body said ENOUGH!) So I listened to my body and backed off. One thing I have learned is... when it is time for recovery you need to go VERY VERY easy. Most people go more like medium claiming to be in recovery, NOT good. Your body never really goes into deep recovery mode and thus when it is time to work hard again you will not have a new foundation to work to a higher level. I think people do this out of fear, fear that if they back off too much they will lose what they have gained. How wrong they are, you would literally have to do nothing for a solid two weeks to see that start to happen. So trust your training and take a much needed break, that is the lesson. I heard one coach say... One of the big difference between age group athletes and the pros is the pros go VERY VERY easy (Of course everything is relevant) on their recovery days and the age group athletes do most of their workouts at medium intensity. They do not recover at an easy enough intensity and they do not go hard enough when it is time to go hard. The examples he was using were easy recovery days verses hard intervals like track work etc. Most age groupers do too long of a session and thus cannot push as hard at the high end but instead opt to go longer. A good example of this is many of the bikers I see and ride with do longer rides and insert VERY high end surges into the ride to simulate a race condition, even though most of them do not race - they "think" this is the ticket to getting faster and there is "some" truth to this. I am not a "roadie" and I have never raced a bike road race but I think they might be better off following some of this same advice from this coach. I think they would do much better doing either a long easy ride, purely for endurance or a long endurance ride with big gear work for muscular endurance inserted periodically into the ride. Save the all out interval work for shorter rides and during the intervals go as hard as you can, recover fully and do it again. I know this has helped my cycling a lot over the past few years so I do not see how Tri would be "that" much different. The main reason explained the coach to not doing extended interval work is that it simply produces very little on the upside and on the downside just causes a longer recovery time between workout sessions to occur. Instead of better high end anaerobic work, you end up with a longer recovery interval because you went out and basically trashed yourself. Believe it or not a 30 minute track session of very hard intervals like 400 repeats etc. is all you need for your body to start waking up the anaerobic engine. A time trial of 8-10 miles, again plenty of high end work or maybe 30 minutes of sprinting in the hills followed by a recovery interval that is equal to half the work interval. More than that just causes a longer recover time before you can work again.

Ok, so back to the ride - we chose the 50k option, yes 30 something miles and we rode at a ridiculously slow pace. That is recovery the way it should be done - we did a short easy run afterwards but to be honest that was very easy as well and just kind of for fun. Personally, I wanted to see how well a couple of people could run that I had never run with and I got my answer.

Best part of all, I saw so many people I knew out riding and it is always great to get out and share the day with such wonderful people. My wife showed up for the luncheon afterwards where we shared more conversation, drink, food and laughs.

I hope your 4th was as good as mine.