Movement Economy: The D'Artagnan of Basic Limiters

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

A little addendum to my Endurance Corner article on ‘basic limiters’ today(http://www.endurancecorner.com/Alan_Couzens/basic_limiters) to address a ‘sort of’ basic limiter – movement economy.

In the article, I defined ‘basic limiters’ as those oft ignored elements of performance that are crucial to all athletes (and maybe all human beings) independent of whatever sport they participate in. In summary, those basic limiters are:

· Aerobic Base (Metabolic Fitness)
· Basic Strength
· Mobility/Stability/Muscle Balance

I half considered adding a 4th basic limiter of movement economy to the equation but it didn’t quite make the cut for the EC article so it wound up here on my personal blog :-) This is the ‘almost a musketeer’ limiter in the sense that while it has some elements that are specific to the individual’s sport, it is a general limiter in the sense that no matter whether your event lasts 2 seconds or 2 days, your ability to transfer metabolic energy into forward movement in the most efficient, economical way possible is a crucial ability.

This ‘sort of’ basic ability is made all the more tricky by the fact that many of our most basic movements are, when you break them down, incredibly complex. Take running for example, an economical run stride demands setting the body in the optimal position to utilize the elastic energy of the tendons coupled with an incredibly complex sequencing of rapidly contracting certain muscles while relaxing others so that inter-muscular resistance is minimized.

Swimming is even more of a mess. Not only must the timing of the optimal contract-relax sequences be figured out, but due to the nature of the resistance, the most economical type of stroke changes with different speeds of movement! Having a longer vessel (and maybe even a slight pause in the stroke) becomes progressively more important with increasing speed.

Contrast these with the relatively simple sport of cycling or basic lifting (which both have a much more steady application of force) and you see how there can be quite a discrepancy between 2 equally ‘powerful’ athletes on the bike (or gym) when it comes to swim and run speed/economy for a given output.

You may be movement economy limited if….

If I were a comedian I’d go Jeff Foxworthy at this point but I’m an exercise scientist so straight to the data…
· Your 30s power on the bike is >7w/kg and you can’t break 30s for a 200m run sprint.
· You can do 12 pull ups in 30s but can’t break 30s for a push start 50m freestyle sprint.

Note: I’m deliberately using short (non specific) tests here to take out the complicating factor of aerobic vs movement economy in longer tests, i.e. fitter athletes will get more mechanical work out of each liter of O2 independent of their movement economy (Coyle et al., 1991)

If you think that movement economy may be a limiter for you…

Incorporate things that teach you to get movement from quick force application followed by relaxation both in the water & out – Light Plyometrics (upper and lower), Agility Drills (dryland and aquatic – learn to accelerate!), Kettle bell/Medicine Ball Work, Jump Rope.

Note that movement economy is also contingent on mobility. For example in running, even if you’ve learned to switch the hip flexor off during the drive phase of gait, if you come up on the limits of your flexibility, it will slow you up!

Mobility is even more of a limiter to economical swimming. If you want to be fast as an adult athlete (over any distance/sport) get a basic level of mobility!

If you suspect that economy may be a limiter, the early season is the perfect time to work on these core issues of mobility & learning to move efficiently.

Train Smart,

AC.

No Guarantees: The Disclaimer

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

"You may have the best laid out training plan yet still fail to get the results you are after, for the very simple reason that you are alive, complex, and affected by a great many variables that you cannot possibly account for—from moon phases to the health of your cat."
- Pavel Tsatsouline (Russian Strength Guru)

This past week I tweeted about a great book that I’m reading at the moment by strength coach (and legend in the world of strength sports), Dan John. The title of the book is “Never Let Go” This is another book that highlights just how similar athletes and, to an extent, training principles are across sports. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. Anyhow, on to the topic of this post....

Dan makes a great point in the book about the relationship between conditioning and performance in different sports. He presents a theoretical continuum from sports with a near perfect correlation between strength in the weight room and performance on the field, e.g. powerlifting at one end, and sports where the relationship is a little more tenuous on the far end, e.g. football. That is to say, that while it’s hard to argue that being stronger would be a negative in the game of football, having the physically strongest team is no guarantee of success. Tactics, skills, psychology along with a little plain old luck, all get tossed in the pot with physical conditioning to determine the ultimate winner on any given Sunday.

While the above is a generally accepted fact in the world of team sports, I’m not so sure that in the endurance sports world of individualism & ‘out working’ the competition it is as readily accepted. Accepted or not, it is a fact that, particularly in Ironman racing, it’s not always the fittest athlete who wins.

I’m in a better position than most to attest to this. I religiously watch the benchmarks and fitness numbers of the athletes that I coach over the course of their season. I’d be lying if I said that I don’t get excited when I see the athlete reach life best fitness numbers. However, every additional year that I spend as a full time coach, this excitement becomes a little more tempered, because every year, without fail, I have an athlete or 2 who don’t manifest the promise of their training numbers on ‘game day’.

The reality is that, just like football, basketball, soccer etc, while being the fittest guy on the start line is a good starting point in Ironman triathlon, it is no guarantee of success. Pacing, psychology, nutrition, climate & luck can all conspire to make a very fit athlete a mid packer on ‘any given Sunday’ To make the deal even a little more sour than it is in the team sports, the coach can’t deliver the post game pep talk of ‘we’ll get em next week’. Nope, the best the Iron coach can do is ‘we’ll get ‘em next year’! Perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising then that for many folks the thought of not getting what they ‘deserve’ from a year or mores worth of training is too much to bear. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me but it does!

Truth is that the very appeal of this sport to me is that it’s really hard to pull off ‘the perfect race’. It’s the same sort of appeal that I suspect draws folks to Everest. You can do all of the right preparation, hone your skills, climb every smaller peak that you can muster but the reality is that there are no guarantees come ‘the day’. Perhaps it will happen, perhaps it won’t but for the truly committed (addicted?) fundamentally, it doesn’t matter. A failed attempt will only heighten the challenge and strengthen their resolve. To me, Ironman triathlon, like climbing Everest, isn’t a sport for the ‘dabbler’, it’s a quest!

Perhaps this mindset is a surprise to those of you who see me as a ‘numbers guy’, as an input output guy and it’s true, I get a lot of fun out of controlling the controllable. I get a lot of fun out of saying that if you do this and do that then I can predict with the highest level of mathematical certainty that your performance on race day will be X:XX and I’ve little doubt that if I took these skills back to a sport like pool swimming, my reputation as a prophet would be bolstered :-) However, I stick with triathlon precisely because of the level of uncertainty, because of the number of factors that need to come together to create the perfect race. I stick with triathlon because I can’t think of a sport that offers a more challenging quest to both coach and athlete. If I’m coaching you, I hope you do too.

Train Smart (and with passion),

AC

Kona Or Bust - Phase 1 (The 2011 Season Review)

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

Gordo and I are currently writing a series of articles for the Endurance Corner website on the topic of “How to Qualify” for Kona (http://www.endurancecorner.com/How_to_Qualify ). I thought I’d expand a little on some of the ideas presented to this point by offering up a couple of case studies.

The first (an example of what not to do) is the story of my own athletic journey through the 2011 season…

In November 2010 I signed up for the following year’s Ironman Arizona with the express intent to qualify for the 2012 edition of the Ironman World Championships in Kona. This post will describe how the journey played out, what I did wrong and what I intend to do differently the second time around in 2012.

The commitment to the Kona goal actually took shape early in 2010. After a number of very inconsistent months of training I found myself essentially ‘starting from scratch’. As a full-time coach, primarily of high level age group athletes, I was in the unique (and perhaps not ideal) position of knowing exactly how out of shape I was relative to where I wanted to be and of the true extent of the journey ahead. At that point, based on that knowledge along with the knowledge of my own training response, I was aware that building to the level of fitness necessary to qualify was, at best, a 2 year proposition.

2010 went close to plan, with a progressive build in both load and fitness. For the more numerically inclined, Chronic Training Load (CTL) going into the 2010 season was a measly 27.3. CTL peaked out at 78.3 at the end of September, a steady gain of ~50CTL over the course of 9 months. My big goal for 2010 wasn’t a race or performance goal, as I knew that based on the starting point PR’s weren’t really in the cards. The big goal was to not have any extended periods of time off as I did at the end of 2009. I wanted to go into 2011 fresh but holding onto a good chunk of the fitness that I had built in the 2010 season. I accomplished that end and began 2011 at a CTL of 45.9 TSS/d (almost 20 points higher than 2010). Based on my experience in studying ramp rates of other athletes, this platform represented a challenging but possible distance from the ~130 TSS/d that I tend to see in male athletes of my age & average ‘trainability’ (expanded on here http://www.endurancecorner.com/Alan_Couzens/athlete_type ) who qualify, assuming a consistent, uninterrupted build over 10 months of preparation in 2011.

Here are the TSS & CTL progressions (monthly average/totals) that I planned at the start of 2011 compared with how it actually went down.

January was strength focused and close to plan. February included our 2011 Tucson camp so load and fitness both bumped above the planned progression. March through June were on or very close to the planned TSS ranges of ~2100 to 2900TSS per month, leading to me closing out June with CTL right on the planned progression at 92.6TSS/d. July was where fitness began to stray from the Kona path.

(My now wife,) Jen and I went to Hawaii in July to get married and training took a necessary back seat. We had a very active wedding/honeymoon, and were able to fit in lots of ocean swims, runs, hikes etc. but the realities of travel time, celebrating with family etc made the planned training load simply unrealistic (2498 of a planned 3118TSS for that month). Looking back on it, I wouldn’t change a thing about the experience (one of the best times of my life!)but I would be more realistic in planning ‘breakthrough athletic years’ to those years without any major ‘life events’ interspersed. I should have taken my own advice on the significance of a mere 2 week period of reduced training presented here…( http://www.endurancecorner.com/How_To_Qualify/AC/realist)

August was a great month. I found it very easy to get back on plan with the inclusion of the EC Colorado climbing camp. Load totals were BIG & right on plan for that month.

September was a similarly solid training month and my highest hourly load for 2011 at 78.5hrs. In fact, I hadn’t put together 2 consecutive months greater than 70hrs since August/Sept of 2004 so, despite closing out the month a little lower than the planned TSS, I was satisfied. In retrospect, this is the second error of the year. As Winston Churchill accurately observed, “sometimes it’s not enough to do our best. We must do what’s required.”

I did a ‘state of the nation’ assessment in October and became aware of the impact that a light July had on my Kona aspirations. I would be lying if I didn’t concede that seeing that goal slip from my fingers had a negative impact on my ability to keep the big weeks rolling along and, despite a solid camp in Tucson with the EC gang, October turned out to be a very light month – less than ideal that close to my A-Race.

November was an appropriate taper based on the CTL that I was going in with but significantly under the initial plan. Going into the race, I was relatively confident based on both my training numbers and simulation workouts that I had a good shot at breaking 10:45, a long ways from Kona qualification but still a best over the distance for me. Due primarily to some nutritional ‘issues’ on the day, that didn’t transpire and I considered myself fortunate to finish under 13hrs. Taken from this perspective, I’m somewhat glad that the year didn’t go 100% according to plan as, if I had have had the fitness to qualify and failed due to messed up execution on the day, I’m sure it would have stung significantly more than it did.

My nutritional issues (and a plan to remedy them in 2012) is the subject of a future post but it is worthwhile taking heed that fitness only explains a part of the Ironman performance equation. Execution on the day (esp nutrition and pacing) are almost equally important. In fact, I did a multiple regression analysis some time ago for the XTri site of the relationship between lab measures and Ironman performance (http://www.xtri.com/features/detail/284-itemId.511709869.html) and found that, among our complete data set, the lab measures (VO2max, LT, fat oxidation) only explained approximately 60% of the variance in Ironman times!

Up until now I’ve been using CTL and fitness synonomously and while, based on my observations, the 2 very closely relate, let’s take it out of the realm of the abstract and look at fitness in a little more depth and in the context of the EC article that I wrote on appropriate benchmarks through the year for the Kona bound athlete (http://www.endurancecorner.com/How_To_Qualify/AC/benchmarks) . I’ve expressed the same benchmarks in the EC article using my own stats (35yo, 1.93m, 80kg bodyweight below



Benchmarks that I hit are shown in green. Benchmarks that I missed are shown in red. Benchmarks that are not highlighted with either color represent no attempt made.

Overall, the numbers confirm the conclusions made above, i.e. that fitness as a whole was on track through to July and fell off track from that point through to the race. Looking at the various components of fitness (across sports and across the power-duration spectrum), however, can often reveal trends in a little more depth than looking solely at trends in training load. For example…

My strength training was put on the back burner with the inclusion of some epic weekend adventure trips and the camps (I was usually not recovered in time to hit the early week strength session) so I’m not sure whether the 210lb/12 squat would have happened. My gut says probably not. I will plan a longer strength emphasis for 2012.

Across the sports, if I had to nominate a weakest sport, it would be the run. While I was easily exceeding the swim and bike benchmarks early season, it took me a while to get on track with the MAF tests. These, along with the 190lb/12 squat benchmarks fell into the ‘just made it’ category. This makes sense when I consider that this year was relatively bike heavy and run light (27% vs a planned 33% of total load).

The final trend somewhat evident is that there are a lot more reds in the long benchmark tests than the short ones. While some of this effect may be related to the fact that most of the long benchmark tests were planned for later in the year, when general fitness was falling off plan, if we look at the July/Aug benchmarks, I significantly exceeded the CP5 and CP20 targets (397W & 332W resp) but missed the 2.5hr # - with a seasons best of 256W. Overall, my fatigue curve from the year was a rather high 8% ( http://www.endurancecorner.com/How_to_Qualify/AC/fatigue_curves ) This confirms to me, the importance of a continued focus on general preparation (aerobic base + strength) in 2012.

In my next post, I’ll present a ‘what to do’ case study from a first time qualifier that I coach and highlight the differences (Hint: If fitness is ‘on the edge’ don’t take 2 weeks off in the middle of the prep :-) I will be using that model, along with the observations above in planning my own Kona or Bust Phase 2 : The 2012 assault!

Train Smart,

AC

Residual Fitness: The impatient don't get it

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

Legendary tri coach Joel Filliol linked up the following short but profound piece from fellow Canadian high performance coach, Craig Taylor in his twitter feed this week. http://rtcguelph.blogspot.com/2011/11/crazy-like-fox.html

The applicability to triathlon training is both direct and profound: So few athletes are truly patient enough to give a plan a chance to work (and those that do are the ones who go on to fulfill their potential and out-perform their peers over the long term).

The one key to year to year improvement is to build on your base of residual fitness.

Residual fitness can be defined as the small but developmentally significant portion of fitness that you truly earn with a year of training. This can be thought of in the same way as interest in a savings account. While the interest earned in a year of savings is small when compared to the total balance of your account, providing you don’t spend it, year after year it adds up!

There are 2 notable temptations (bred of impatience) that constantly encourage the athlete to spend their ‘interest’.

1. Racing: Races respresent a withdrawal from the proverbial bank account. When an athlete tapers, races and recovers they are essentially spending rather than adding to their reserves. Any more than 4-6 weeks of spending each year (including rest periods, vacation, sickness) and the athlete will rapidly deplete their account. Developing athletes simply don’t have the funds to race frequently at a high level.

2. Sharpening: When it comes to protocol there are plenty of ‘get rich quick’ schemes out there enticing the athlete who wants a quick return. Some of these work… in the short term. Intensification can offer the athlete a quick return on the funds that they have but if the athlete devotes too much of their base to these high yield, high risk areas the results are directly comparable to what happens in the finance metaphor – their reserves are rapidly depleted.

Related to the second, frequent changes in protocol result in the athlete spending time not depositing anything into their account, sitting around scratching their head and ‘living off their interest’. I can attest from experience as an athlete and a coach that there is a definite lag time involved in transitioning from one protocol to another, a lag time that the serious athlete simply can’t afford if they’re committed to achieving their potential. Tweaks are OK but overhauls simply take you out of the game for too long. Think seriously about the ‘momentum cost’ of any change.

When it comes to long term athletic development, most folks underestimate the value in simply staying the course.

Train smart.

AC

Learn from my mistakes

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)



“No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar”
- Donald Foster.

It’s been another good season for the my squad of athletes. Multiple Kona qualifiers, some podiums at Mdot 70.3 and IM events and several personal best performances. The bulk of this credit goes to the passion and drive of the athletes that I work with but as a coach I also have to conclude that I did my bit and got a lot right.

Still, as a naturally critical thinker, and as someone committed to constant and never-ending improvement in those areas of my life that I am most empassioned by, as we move into the post-season review, my thoughts go to those things that I tried that didn’t work so well this season.

When I was starting out I, like most new coaches, made a bad habit of focusing on my successes and sweeping errors under the rug (or worse, blaming the athlete). This may be good for the ego and for business but it is no route to growth. If you’re truly committed to reaching the top of your game in any field, an honest and frank assessment about what truly works and what doesn’t is a necessity. So, with a view to preserving these lessons so that…

a) I learn from them and don’t make them again!

b) you, as the self-coached athlete, benefit from the fact that by coaching a lot of folks I have the opportunity to do more things right and wrong every season

I am recording them here (I will add to this post as more thoughts come up during post-season reviews so keep checking back).

Lesson 1 – Address weaknesses when load is low.

Every year I devote a portion of the training cycle to addressing the athlete’s greatest athletic limiter. Sometimes this is strength, sometimes basic endurance or speed and sometimes this limiter falls in the middle of the power-duration curve as a weakness in threshold or VO2 #s.

I made the mistake in a couple of cases this year of including a general prep period that was too long for athletes who already had very strong base fitness numbers. This resulted in us starting work on higher quality sessions directed to the athlete’s limiter when load was already pretty high.

Although these sessions were of moderate load, because they represented the athletes weakest ability they felt very hard to the athletes, hard enough that something had to give, in one case this was the quality of these workouts so the weakness remained a weakness, in another it was general training load. The take home – for an athlete that already has a very strong aerobic base, address specific weaknesses earlier, when the athlete still has energy/the overall load is still manageable.

Lesson 2 – When it comes to IM athletes, reverse tapers are often good for both the head and body.

Reverse tapers, i.e. in the last block of the year, progressively building load towards the event are something that I experimented a little more with this year. They seemed to work well for 2 reasons…

1. An Ironman race is not a sprint. Many of the physiological adaptations that are crucial to Ironman success, e.g. glycogen supercompensation quickly detrain and are lost if volume is shed too much or too early from the event.

2. Quality training is HARD for an athlete that spends a lot of time going relatively slow. So, having a very light recovery week immediately after the hardest training block of the year before going into the peppier peak training results in more sessions completed to plan and a happier, more confident athlete going into the key race.

Lesson 3 – When the goal is qualifying, course selection (with respect to your morphology) matters.

Some folks naturally gravitate towards hard (i.e. hilly, windy or hot) courses. Some folks naturally gravitate towards fast (flat, relatively cool) courses. When your preferences don’t line up with your morphology and the goal is high performance relative to your peers (i.e. qualification), then you have a problem.

Heat will set an absolute ceiling on power output. If you’re a big guy, it doesn’t matter if you have the strength to churn out 350 watts for 9hrs, the realities of thermodynamics will dictate the power output that you’re actually able to generate by way of the heat that you’re actually able to dissipate.

Similarly, power:weight will determine who goes to Kona on a course with a lot of vertical. Power:frontal area will determine who goes to Kona on a flat course. Due to the realities of allometric scaling, a big guy will always have better power:frontal area than power:weight and should choose his course accordingly.

Lesson 4 – Don’t sacrifice load for quality until you’re ready to sharpen for a major race.

It may be a bit of a generalization, but from my perspective, a little too much is made of addressing limiters. The central element in athletic progress has always been and will always be improvements in ability to handle more chronic training load.

When it comes to the performance benefit of training, it is true that an athlete will generally get more performance benefit per unit of training load by addressing those areas that are least developed. However, if too much emphasis is given to addressing these weaknesses, to the extent that the athlete is doing less load but feeling that the training is ‘hard’ and they consequently shed total load, it is a dangerous slippery slope that is all too easy to stumble on.

For the bulk of the season, a balance must be kept between training content that enables the athlete to get a lot of training load done (this refers to both areas in which the athlete is naturally physiologically strong but also those areas that they most enjoy), while addressing a relatively small amount to those areas that the athlete isn’t good at/doesn’t enjoy as much, all the while keeping a vigilant eye on total training load.

Lesson 5 - Climate can have a significant effect on your ability to do/tolerate big load.

Training in very hot or very cold conditions is tough. It adds an additional stress to the training that you really don't want to deal with when the focus is training as much as possible (whether in the context of the biggest blocks of the year or a dedicated training camp). Give plenty of thought to when all factors are most likely to conspire to benefit your training when planning your race schedule and give plenty of thought to selection of the best possible locale for a training camp. If the aim is a late season camp with a lot of load at your target race intensity, be sure that the typical conditions for that period of the year also mimic the race as closely as possible. You put a lot of time and $$ into organizing yourself for a training camp. Make it count.

***

I’ll continue to add some more ‘lessons’ (though hopefully not too many :-) over the coming weeks as they crop up during our post-season reviews.

Until then….

Train smart,

AC

The key to building an effective coaching relationship

(Or any relationship for that matter...)




The picture above is of myself and Mike Coughlin, 3rd place Ultraman Canada 2010 & a long standing athlete in the AC stable, cresting the top of Mt Evans (the highest paved road in America) on our recent Endurance Corner Colorado Climbing Camp.

Mike is in Boulder for the summer (training for Ultraman Hawaii) and has been staying with Jen and I for a bit. It’s always interesting living 24/7 with someone. You learn about that person on a whole new level but the ongoing reflection of how others live differently also forces you to learn about yourself. He and I were stopping for a mid-ride cookie in Nederland the other day when a thought came to me –while we both have an unquenchable passion for triathlon in common, when it comes to a coaching relationship, we truly are the odd couple – Apart from the physical differences, Mike is the quintessential extrovert. He is a verbal guy, I’m a read-write guy. He’s a ‘take in your environment’ guy, I’m a ‘live in your head’ guy. And, I have to think that all of these differences are what make for a coaching relationship that really works.

In Chuckie’s latest blog, he talks about the importance of relating with athletes on an emotional level, citing the example of a coaching buddy who doesn’t fall under the “Rah Rah” category of motivational coaching. I’m not sure if I’m that buddy but it certainly sounds like something I would say :-) and it’s true that I’m much more likely to calm an athlete down than to rev them up. Funnily enough (perhaps for this very reason), I tend to work with athletes who are plenty revved up themselves! Often I’m pulling on the reins, holding them back from how hard they want to train and how much they want to do. Then for maybe 10% of the year, a couple of carefully chosen words act as the proverbial flick of the riding crop to carry them over the finish line, but, with these athletes, it doesn’t take much.

I think the reason that I tend to work with that type of athlete comes down to what Darwin called Natural Selection. Those that demand more extrinsic motivation to keep following the plan fall by the wayside. The last athlete that I parted ways with fell under this category –

Athlete: “Coach, I don’t feel like I’m getting what I deserve given the training I’m putting in”

Me: “We all respond at different rates to the training. Some folks have to put in more training than others to get the same result. That’s just a reality of that fact that we’re all individuals”

Athlete: “But I have been talking with my buddies and they think I would do better on a lower volume, more intensity driven program”

Me: “We have tried & tested different compositions of intensity and arrived at the best balance of load/intensity for your physiology. If we add more intensity, your load drops beyond what you’ve proven necessary to get better”

Athlete: “Well, I want to try this type of program…”

Me: “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out…” Well, I didn’t really say that but you get the point.

Fundamentally, this athlete just no longer had the passion for the sport to spend that much time on their bike each week. Maybe this passion is something that some coaches can re-ignite, or at least bolster, maybe not. Either way, that is not a coaching ‘skill’ that I particularly want to develop. If an athlete doesn't have the intrinsic passion to enjoy A LOT of training then there is only so much I can do.

No, the athletes that I work with long term are those that realize that, despite best instinct, when it comes to an effective coaching relationship (or any relationship designed towards achieving a result), it is important to seek out the things that you NEED rather than the things that you WANT, i.e. the things that you don’t have intrinsically. For most of my guys this turns out to be - long term planning, structure and the ability to put the brakes on when needed. For other coaches’ athletes, it may be motivation, excitement or social reinforcement. Either way, it is important before beginning a coaching relationship to be honest in what you expect to get out of it and to seek that type of person, even if that type of person may be the same type that you beat up in high school :-)

Taking the “what I need vs what I want” approach is going to demand an additional, all important quality – tolerance, i.e. the ability to embrace working with folks who think a little differently, and sometimes bite one’s tongue and just get on with the business at hand. Put another way, when working with others who have different strengths, different weaknesses will also become apparent. As a slow and steady ‘thinker’ sometimes I’m sure athletes are mildly irritated by the time it takes me to digest, consider, think, research and then respond to questions. I have to assume that those who stick with me & tolerate a less speedy response time consider a quality, thought-out response more important than a quick ‘off the cuff’ style answer, even though it goes against their own Type A instincts. Similarly, I often find myself having to re-communicate the same logical response to a question, a few times, in a few different iterations before it finally breaks through all of the negative emotional self talk that may be bouncing around a more emotional athletes’ noggin before it takes hold.

I guess it takes a certain level of maturity to reach the point that you truly begin to recognize the value in diversity and begin to let in, or even seek, folks you know will personally challenge you on all levels, but when you do I can absolutely attest that the synergy that results from working with others with the same passion but different strengths and outlooks will lead to infinitely more productive relationships, whether in coaching, business or personal development than filling your world with mirror images of yourself.

Train Smart,

AC

You are off course

This past weekend I did one of my favorite things – I packed up a (relatively) small selection of my worldly belongings into a set of panniers, grabbed my bike and took off in search of adventure. While, the act of seeking adventure would have been rewarding in itself, I had a destination in mind – the top of Pikes Peak. This was my second attempt at the summit after being turned around the last time that I attempted it (about a month ago) due to icy conditions.
So, I grabbed my bike, my trail shoes & my Garmin and took off on the 115mi ride to the Springs followed by a 24mi hike (+10,325ft) to the summit….

I had planned out the route the last time that I did it and uploaded to my Garmin 310XT. For those unfamiliar with this Garmin, while it doesn’t have full function mapping typical of the Garmin units that you might see in cars, it has a neat little ‘breadcrumb map’ which shows you the general direction you should be heading and lets you know if you’re ‘off course’.

The first time that I used it there was a bit of a learning curve. I brought the map up and hit the “Do Course” button and attempted to head in the direction of the map but within a mile of starting my watch started buzzing – “you are off-course”. I could see my little arrow looked to be right on the planned line on the map but I obviously wasn’t going where I wanted to go. I thought to myself, this thing is useless! In fact, worse than useless, I had planned out a detailed, pretty complex route to Colorado Springs incorporating trails and secondary roads to avoid the hustle and bustle of the more travelled routes but at least the travelled routes had street signs! I had what looked like a clear map in front of me, but I plain and simple wasn’t able to follow it because the big picture perspective obscured the fine detail that was needed to make the right turns to get to my destination.

Chuckie V wrote a really thought provoking post on his blog this week (http://chuckiev.blogspot.com) that reminded me a lot of this experience. The ‘text book method’ of planning training consists of putting together this big picture road map along the lines of what Joe Friel recommends in the Triathlete’s Training Bible or what Tudor Bompa recommends in his legendary training text - Periodization: Theory and Methodology of Training but anyone who has followed the textbook method can probably relate to the experience… You spend countless hours putting together a detailed annual training plan, you kick things off, excited and fired up that this plan will get you to your goal and then before too long something happens and sure enough you’re getting the metaphorical buzz – “You are off-course”. Believe me, at times like this it’s more than tempting to throw your big picture plan (and the watch that it’s attached to) out the window and resolve instead to ‘feel your way’ to your destination.

The above paragraph pretty well sums up how I was feeling when I rolled through my first intersection.. “You are off course”. Alright, let me stop, turn my bike around and try another direction.. “You are off-course”. This process of elimination was going to make for a mighty long ride to the Springs. Until…. I discovered that if you press the little side buttons on the Garmin it allows you to zoom in and makes the immediate route more clear. Genius! I can zoom in to an 800m scale and all of the turns that I need to make suddenly become much more clear.

Relating this to coaching, I realize I do the same thing in planning an athlete’s training program. While the very general big picture map is there a couple of screens away to guide the overall route to the destination, my specific 'nitty gritty detail' focus is on the immediate block of training. What training sessions and what training load are going to get us to our short term destination? While the big picture plan is somewhat useful in plotting what those short term destinations may be, the scale is both too fuzzy and too overwhelming to be of practical value on a day to day basis.

So, after discovering those little side buttons I thought I had it figured. If in doubt about which way to go, I’d simply scale down to look at how to get to the next immediate objective. But then a funny thing happened. I was riding along to the next path that I had plotted on the map and I get there and discover that what I thought was a bike path was actually a golf course path. Now, I’m not one to adhere to the rules when I need to get somewhere but getting to this particular path from the road I was on would require a 20ft rappel down a sheer wall with my 75lb loaded bike! It was impassable. I thought, oh great, one little mistake and my whole plan is wrecked. I was tempted again to throw that Garmin off the rock wall! I now had no choice but to abandon the well thought out plan and go off-course. So, I took off in the general direction of where I thought I needed to go and noticed a very cool thing. While my arrow may have been off the course, having the perspective of where the course goes, gave me something to shoot for. I tracked parallel to that course until I found a way to cut across. I took it and I was back on plan.

I had another one of these occurrences happen as I was going through the trail that runs through the Air Force Academy. I had no idea that there was a trail closure until I was pretty much on top of it. And another as I approached the summit of Pikes Peak, the planned trail had knee deep snow that was practically impassable. In both instances I had to find another way. Thanks to my (now trusty) Garmin, I was able to head off course confidently knowing that I would be able to eventually find my way back to the planned route if I just kept it in sight.

Point being, as Chuckie very eloquently points out, things almost never work out 100% according to plan. There will be times when you hit unforeseen road blocks and obstructions that make you feel like throwing the plan into the nearest river but if you persist, if you pick realistic routes, if you focus on the short term while keeping the long term in the back of your mind, if you are flexible enough to temporarily divert from the plan when needed while still recognizing the importance of having some semblance of a route to your destination in sight at all times, you will arrive at your destination far more quickly & surely than someone who starts the journey without a map. As the Cheshire Cat very truthfully observes in Alice in Wonderland

Alice: Oh, no, no. I was just wondering if you could help me find my way.
Cheshire Cat: Well that depends on where you want to get to.
Alice: Oh, it really doesn't matter, as long as...
Cheshire Cat: Then it really doesn't matter which way you go.

In other words if it’s all about the journey & the experience then perhaps a map isn’t required but I’ve got to say planning out a route in your head then physically following it (as closely as possible) to arrive at your planned destination is pretty darn satisfying…



Train Smart.
AC