Calling all STOTANS!!!

"You only ever grow as a person when you spend time outside your comfort zone"
- Percy Cerutty
The pic above is of one of my all time heroes, Aussie track coach Percy Cerutty, leading one of his charges, a young guy by the name of Herb Elliott (who went on to hold the world 800m record!!) up one of the sand dunes that made up Percy’s ‘international athletic center’, in reality a couple of shacks on a beach in Portsea, Victoria.

Percy’s athletics was backed up by a fundamental philosophy that resonates loudly with me. He even had a name for his philosophy and accompanying code of conduct. He called it the STOTAN code. The word stotan is a composite of two words:

Stoic: A philosophy based on deriving pleasure from virtue and being unmoved by necessary hardship.

Spartan: An ancient greek culture based on loyalty, discipline and acting for the greater good.

I have had some recent conversations with Gordo that have forced me to look at what motivates me both as a coach and an athlete and I keep coming back to these principles.

I recently had an athlete put in a breakthrough performance and qualify for Kona. Of course, I was eagerly watching the web on Sunday, checking out his performance and I knew he was on the verge of something special. When he finished the race, I was excited to know that he was on the cusp of a Kona slot, and even more excited the next day to hear the news that he had secured one. But the real ‘lump in the throat’ moment for me came when I read his race report and realized just how much tenacity he showed out there, how deep he had to dig and how far into himself he had to go to reach a level he had never reached before. A level of athletic achievement? Yes. But it’s more than that, to me, in a lot of ways, it is those moments of pushing your previous limits that personally define us.

When Gordo asked me why I was in the sport, my initial knee-jerk was “to get better, to improve my performance.” But, the more I think about it, the more I realize that, while I want to get better, in the end, the thing that keeps me going is, as Pierre De Coubertin suggested, not the triumph but the struggle. It’s a weird thing isn’t it? But it’s almost common for athletes, especially truly great athletes to have a penchant for “the hard way”. If my time in Aussie swim squads taught me nothing, it taught me that the smile that creeps over the coach on pool deck often has nothing to do with faster times for a set or the thought of a possible medal at the next meet, the smile is all about those principles that I mentioned above; an inspiring display of loyalty, discipline and athletes who are unmoved by the necessary hardship of athletics.

On the surface, there is obviously a certain joy that comes from knowing that you are doing something that others aren’t willing to do. On the deeper level, I think that this emotional satisfaction stems from something that the Eastern religions realized long ago, that to become an individual with a soul, a spiritual entity independent of our brain and material shell, occasionally we must act independently of them. We must do things that challenge our body, we must do things that challenge our rational thoughts, e.g. jump on our bikes and ride 5hrs up a mountain despite the fact that we know rationally that with a base of 2x1hr trainer rides a week, it’s probably not a smart thing to do :-), just to prove that “I” am more than my rational thoughts. For whatever reason, call it God, call it destiny, call it whatever, some cosmic force has determined that “I” am an athlete.

It is also probably fair that I let my athletes know that this is also what motivates me as a coach. Of course I want you to get better. I want you to achieve your athletic goals. I want you to get healthy. All of that. But I also want you to experience those moments where you bust through your own self concept. Those moments of self-control and fortitude that show you that you are so much stronger than your emotions and your whims. You are so much more. Every time you complete a basic week. Every time you get out of bed and get ready to train as soon as your alarm clock goes off. Every time that you hit the supermarket instead of hitting Mickey D’s not only makes me proud of you as an athlete, it also fulfils me to know that I am helping you discover a self that is independent of your thoughts, your whims, your cravings. I am helping you discover your true self. In answer to Gordo’s question…. THAT is why I am a coach.

In retrospect, the title isn’t totally apt, I’m not calling all Stotans, just one :-) I have one slot left for coaching over the next year. If what I have said strikes a chord, drop me an email.

Also, I just headed over to my buddy Chuckie V's website and he posted an awesome blog along a similar line. Talk about cosmic force!!

Real World Periodization III: The Specific Prep Phase

As the snow thaws and spring approaches, I thought that it might be timely if I threw out a blog entry on the Specific Preparatory phase of training. For most folks who are targeting a late Summer race, they will probably be getting ready to enter this very important phase of training.

Many of you will be familiar with a chart similar to the one below that describes the general process of periodization, as outlined by Tudor Bompa in his landmark book, “Theory and methodology of training”.

As you can see, during the specific prep phase of training, the general trend is an increase in training intensity while volume of training is slightly increased or maintained. It is important to note, that for endurance athletes, it is not until the very end of the specific prep phase and the transition to the race prep phase that volume begins to take a ‘back seat’ to intensity. For ultra-endurance athletes, this is even more pronounced and for novice to intermediate ultra-endurance athletes it may never be appropriate to sacrifice your progressive volume development in order to emphasize intensity.

The training methods:
* More emphasis on overload through training intensity (for endurance athletes, this means more intensive endurance work – esp. moderately hard work in and around VT1)
* Maintenance or slight increase of training volume.

Here is where a lot of folks go wrong with the specific prep portion of their training year.

Too many “A” races.
I was fortunate to grow up in the world of elite swimming, where ‘shaving down’ for a race differentiated it big time from your regular weekly mid-season meets. This difference in focus often equated to a 5-7% difference in performance in the swimmer’s C event vs. their A event. Why do they do it this way? So that they don’t sacrifice training volume or intensity in the name of unimportant races. What does this mean for you? If you don’t have the kahunas to handle your training buddy Bill beating you by 10 minutes in a mid-season race, then you’re probably best not to race until it matters.

Too much intensity.
In my experience, the norm for most athletes from the snowy states is diminished volume during the winter due to weather constraints, followed by a period of sun-induced insanity when the weather clears that is characterized by long, hard group training rides with your training buddies and/or the obligatory functional threshold intervals to ‘get you ready’ for your over ambitious race schedule. In other words, many athletes go straight from a transition/off season phase to a pre-competitive phase and skip the 2 phases that are most essential to your long term development as an athlete: The general and specific preparation phases.

It is very easy for athletes in this pattern to develop a rationalization that they are time limited and therefore need to get the most ‘bang for their buck’ by focusing on intensity vs. volume. For some this is indeed the case. Most, however, when we really get down to it are energy limited, not time limited. And when a big withdrawal is made from the energy bank account with a long, intense weekend ride, it is very easy to rationalize skipping the Monday workout by finding something ‘more important’ to do.

It never ceases to amaze me how much training successful age group athletes manage to fit around their very successful working and family lives. However, a progressively growing bank of energy is a pre-requisite for this.

So, what is an appropriate volume and intensity for the specific prep phase of training for most AG athletes?

A simple rule of thumb is, don’t sacrifice volume for intensity until you are 10-12 weeks from a very important A-RACE. This means if you try and up the ante on one of your key sessions but wind up dropping volume from the week, the session was too hard. No rationales, no excuses, no “if I could have slept an extra hour I think I could handle it”, no “I think I felt a cold coming on this week, on a normal week I could handle it”. If you truly care about your long term development as an athlete, be very cautious and deliberate as to the times you choose to drop volume for intensity. For myself, these are the situations that I am willing to do that:

If my training data indicates I have a shot at a Kona slot
“ “ “ “ I have a shot at an AG podium at a major race
“ “ “ “ I have a shot at getting my elite card.
“ “ “ “ I have a shot at an elite podium.

That’s it. Other than that, it’s onward and upward. The “peak him here, peak him there, peak him everywhere” approach is no way to achieve your full potential in the sport.

To be fair, there is one other situation in which it may be appropriate to drop volume and increase intensity and that is when aerobic performance plateaus. I am reluctant to include this exception for two reasons:

Most athletes that I have worked with significantly underestimate how long they can improve from solely doing aerobic work. We are talking about a multi-year adaptation here. There is no need for speed until you are a very established athlete.

Most athletes simply don’t have the data to determine when a plateau is occurring. The “I feel flat so I think I need some speedwork” doesn’t cut it. Show me the numbers – a multi-month plateau in the aerobic numbers from your benchmark sets.

Other than that, keep doing more, keep doing it faster and you will become a better athlete. Simple as that.

Two tickets to the Gun Show

The video above is from one of my favourite movies, Anchorman. This week’s blog entry is about morphological characteristics of elite Ironman triathletes, or more specifically, how big are their guns? I guess in reality, I’m more interested in the correlation between things like thigh girth, muscle cross sectional area and performance, but I’ll take any excuse to throw a Will Ferrel reference in there J

One of my own personal struggles as a triathlete is with the issue of bodyweight. At various points in my athletic career, my pre-occupation with my bodyweight has bordered on dysfunctional. The issue is not helped by the obvious reinforcement that comes from running my fastest marathon ever, which was ~20 minutes faster than my next fastest marathon, at 158lbs. For my 6’4” frame, you can imagine I was pretty skinny. In fact, all of the times in my past that I would consider I was running relatively fast have been at a low bodyweight (158-165lbs). I always assumed this relationship to be causative. Now, I’m not so sure.

The crew (Mat, JD) and I just returned from Endurance Corner’s inaugural spring training camp in Tucson, AZ. The camp was a great experience all around, great training, great people, great environment. For myself, one of the highlights of camp was a discussion that I had with Jonas Colting (World Champion and 2x Ultraman Champion). Jonas was great to be around for a couple of reasons. Number 1, he is a great archetype for the sort of athlete I could become. He is a big, strong dude, and a great runner to boot (that’s him in the yellow crocs below)

#2: He is one of those athletes with a no-limits attitude. It can become easy for athletes with egocentric personalities to buy into the “I guess I was born to be a gifted athlete.” This is particularly true when anyone with a rudimentary understanding of exercise physiology is familiar with the work of Daniels, Yarbough & crew, who ultimately came to the conclusion that the gold standard of aerobic performance (VO2max) is largely genetically determined. In my mind, I am yet to see a study with sufficient duration that has led me to conclusively agree with this. Perhaps my own bias is coming into play here. If so, I’m fine with that I’d much rather adopt a self serving inaccurate belief than a self-defeating accurate belief any day of the week.

Anyhow, back to the convo with Big J….

It was Jonas’ take that muscular demand for O2, i.e. having bigger oxidative fibers, can be a potent stimulus for VO2max improvement. This was interesting to me for a couple of reasons - #1, I was re-reading Noakes ‘Lore of Running’ on the car trip down and he comes to a similar conclusion:

“The high rate of Oxygen delivery to those skeletal muscles, which is needed to sustain their function during maximal exercise is the result, not the cause of an athlete’s superior exercise capacity.”

#2 I had largely discounted those bigger athletes who do well at endurance sports as genetic freaks, e.g. Big Mig with his 7.04 L/min VO2max. Sure he goes up hill pretty quick, but for us mere mortals without his engine, if we want to go uphill quickly or we want to run quickly and we’re lacking a couple of L/min of absolute VO2max, the only way we are going to improve our relative VO2max is to shed some pounds. As Noakes’ perspective above suggests, this may not be the case.

The last VO2max test that I did resulted in a max oxygen uptake of 4.5 L/min. Decent, but certainly not elite by any stretch of the imagination. If we accept the traditional view on VO2max that claims that the best I can hope for is a 5-15% improvement in my ‘engine size’, it is pretty clear that I have a much better shot at long term improvement by making my modifying my chassis and making it more efficient than spending a lot of energy eeking out the last 5% from my engine. However, if we adopt the alternative approach that ST/FOG fiber demand for O2 is a potent stimulus for VO2max improvement, hypertrophy of these fibers becomes a viable objective.

This perspective does have some scientific support, particularly in the European Exercise Phys literature. Berbalk has done a number of studies looking at training load, fiber size and cardiac adaptations and has shown a definitive link between the 3 among endurance athletes. Is it causative? Maybe yes, maybe no, but at least in my mind it makes enough intuitive sense to be worthy of further exploration and I’m not going to wait around on the lab rats to do the exploration for me!!

So, what is the ideal endurance athlete muscle make-up?

a) ST/FT%: A number of studies have shown a higher % of slow twitch fiber area in endurance athletes vs. speed athletes vs. untrained. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 65-85% ST fibers for endurance trained athletes (Costill et al., 1976). While the ST/FT balance seems to have genetic determinants, deliberate atrophy of the FG fibers can affect the ST/FT balance.

b) ST/FT fiber size. Strength-endurance athletes, e.g. rowers, cyclists, swimmers typically have FOG fibers 1.3x the size of untrained individuals and 1.5x the size of pure endurance athletes, e.g. marathon runners (Pieper, Scharschmidt, 1981)

What does this look like in real world terms?

VS.

And the numbers? Gordo was kind enough to forward some recent anthropometric data from his Snowfarm stay in NZ. Compare the numbers below to some data that I have from elite Australian distance runners at the A.I.S (mean values, n=18) and my own measurements

A couple of observations jump out when comparing G with similarly elite distance runners:

1. He is heavier. Even when corrected for height, G is carrying an extra 1.1 grams for every cm of height.

2. While heavier, the extra weight is made up of fat-free mass (bone and muscle) as he is similarly lean to the elite distance runners.

3. He has a larger frame than the elite distance runners (at least if we take biepicondylar femur breadth to be representative of bone widths through the skeletal frame)

4. He has greater calf girth than the distance runners. As previously mentioned, this is largely independent of calf skinfolds and is primarily indicative of greater cross-sectional muscle fiber area in the lower leg musculature. A theoretical basis for why this might be the case is given in point b above.

When comparing G’s data with my own, the observations do more than jump out, they leap from the page and punch me square between the eyes. In fairness to Gordo, I must point out that the same conclusions that I am forced to draw from the data are exactly what he has been telling me for some time now. Ditto Matty Stein for that matter, but as Tidwell from Jerry Maguire sort of said, whenever I am confronted with an assertion made without empirical data my gut response is “show me the numbers!!” Well, there they are. It will be interesting to see what I do with them.