Breakthrough workouts – a key element of preparation for my triathlon season – never announce themselves until you are in the middle, or even near the end, of one.
Laid out in advance, as my workouts for this entire year are, a training schedule appears to advance in an orderly progression from sloth through gentle prodding, to serious roadwork, finishing with a period of sharpening. One workout is meant to lead smoothly to the next, little bitty steps adding up over weeks and months to a giant leap in performance.
But that’s not really the way it works. Usually, I wallow around for weeks at a time, adding distance, time or effort in measured doses, but not seeing any real improvement in speed or ease of effort. Frustration mounts. Fear appears – fear that I won’t get any better, that THIS TIME, I will end up going to the races and utterly fail to perform. Ten years I’ve been on this road, and I still haven’t really accepted that returns of the investment of training are more like the stock market, not the bond market. And if it’s like stocks, then … maybe it’ll crash!. Maybe I’ll just blow up and enter triathlon bankruptcy – whatever that would be.
Then, one day, for no discernible reason, a door is unlocked. I go through, and, effortlessly, rise to the next level. Yesterday, while swimming at the Bally’s pool in Tacoma, I had one of those breakthroughs. The technical details: after warming up for 20 minutes or so, I started into a set of 200 meters, repeated 10 times, with 20 seconds rest in between each. The was to be done at a moderate to hard pace, or just a little teeny bit faster than I might race it in an Ironman. That would mean turning them over in about 3 minutes and 30 to 34 seconds. I knew I wasn’t up to that (or assumed I wasn’t). The program also said I was to do 6 to 10 of these. So I plugged away at the first three or four, hitting them all in 3:44, which seemed just about right – what I would expect based on the shorter repeats the past few weeks.
And then, without me consciously deciding to do anything different, I felt stronger. I started to go a bit faster. So instead of wondering if I could get away with doing only 8 repeats, I started to see just how fast I could go. 3:39 … 3:37 … 3:33 … 3:29 … 3:28 … oops, I’ve got one more to make ten, I don’t know if I can hang on … 3:26!
Wow. The switch turned on and I discovered another gear. One I’ve had before, but which mysteriously takes a vacation every year in November. Where it goes, I do not know – maybe it heads south for the winter, and ends up with some other triathlete in Australia training for IM New Zealand. Or, possibly, it finds a local host, some kid on a high school swim team, a hanger on who barely makes the cut, always ends up 4th, 5th or 6th in the dual meets, and certainly never qualifies for state.
Then, I start sending out alerts, sonar beeps aiming for my long lost racing gear, providing a homing beacon through the planet’s aquasphere. Like some forlorn pigeon (or albatross?) aimlessly seeking shelter, my racing gear finds its way home across the broad and lonely waters.
Of course, there is the small issue of the NEXT gear, which I now have to start seeking. Having a barely usable Ironman racing gear in hand is worthless if I want to swim a shorter race, like 1500 or 1900 meters, Or, god forbid, the 750 of a sprint. I sigh, and try to imagine what gruesome punishment will be necessary to call THAT baby home, sometime in April. Weekly doses of sprints at uber-exhausting speeds – how many weeks of that before the NEXT breakthrough swimming workout?
So, my body is still trainable – at least in swimming. Running – I’m not there yet. I’m still wallowing around in 8-10 mile “long” runs (they should be closer to 11 or 12 by now), at a 9:07 min/mile pace (it should be 8:50). But then I’ve done NO speed work yet. And I pissed away my six weeks recovery time after IM Arizona – no running races at all for me this winter. Thus it probably won’t be until early May that I find out if I’ve got the same running legs as last year, those two or three extra gears above a long run pace, gears to build the strength to blow by the field in the last mile or two, which I’ve gotten accustomed to by, and which I intend to call in in Idaho, Hawaii, and Arizona. Strength I’ll need to have a chance to set the North American race course records, and leap into the top five at the world championships in Kona.
And cycling – we’re not going anywhere NEAR a breakthrough workout until middle of March at the earliest. Triathlete anxiety and guilt is festering close to the surface, while I am taking two weeks “off” to go skiing again. I am sure it will all work out, though. 24 weeks of focused training is far too much for me at this stage of my career – I think I can get ready in 15-18 weeks for IM Coeur d’Alene.