The Season Overview

First and foremost, comparing to 2011 to 2010, if nothing else good happened the fact that I didn’t find myself cratered into a near life ending depresssion can only be seen as a good thing,  Frankly, compared to last year, anything would have been an improvement. 

Beyond that, I came into this season with the plan to move up both in distance (from the half to the full marathon) along with level (from the open to the elite).  My preparation was a bit truncated, by maybe a month coming out of the mess that was 2010 but I can’t honestly say that was the big issue.

Somehow the season managed to start disastrously with the Ronde Von Manda (where I got dropped right away and spent 2 hours riding through the cold, gray countryside) and end almost identically in Duluth (where I got dropped right away and spent 90 minutes skating through the cold, gray countryside).   I am obsessed with cycles but this is why: my life seems to run on them.

In between those two things, it was a little more variable.  I was happy with my performance at the Texas Road Rash although it identified some differences in the racing I had moved to; even though I didn’t do the final race, breaking a decade+ old issue of mine (cracking 20 minutes) against the 10k in Chicago was a high point.

I even got involved in bike racing, something I had managed to avoid for the near decade I had ridden and that not only provided another outlet for my mediocre ability and competition drive but I got some good experience, got some good training, avoided the crashes and started to get more comfortable in the pack.

So let’s get more specific

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Overall Training Response

Mind you, I did have one close call with the spectre of overtraining and depression during this overall season.  It came in something like week 13 of my first block of training and pointed out something important for me: I’m good for about 12 weeks of continuous (and progressive) training before I need to take some recovery.  This simply points to my needing to structure my training exactly along those lines, 3 months of training followed by at least 1 week (and possibly 2) of easy recovery.

I also realized that training a maximum of 5 days/week but with most of them double sessions works for me in a way that trying to train 6 days/week (even if some of them aren’t doubled) does not.  Cutting out that one extra day (and making at least one day per week piss easy, talking 125 HR on the rollers or whatever) made a huge difference in terms of staying mentally and physically fresh.

But that’s basic training, what did my racing tell me?

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Bike Racing Analysis

I don’t have a ton to say about this at this point.  Getting into bike racing this year was sort of a reflection of the lack of inline races.  There are a total of about 10 in the country and all but one require travelling which is hard to justify on a lot of levels, not the least of which given my dog anxiety and not liking to be away from home for extended periods. 

The existence of a big local cycling community (and weekly racing at the Driveway series) is a big help.  Not only does it let me get competition experience but there is no better training stimulus than competition, it forces you to a level that you just can’t reach on your own.  That cycling dynamics are fairly similar to skating dynamics (big pack of guys, drafting, tactics) helps as well, it gives me a way to cover a bunch of needed factors (physiological and psychological) conveniently.  I can literally race weekly from about early April to Mid-October if I want.

Certainly the Ronde Von Manda was a big shock to my system, I wasn’t prepared for the distance or the dynamics of the race, especially when everyone went off like a bat out of hell off the start (I’m told this is common to shake off stragglers; it sure threw me off) and I even ran into that issue during the Driveway series and I will be far more prepared next year.

The shortness of the Driveway, 25 minutes means pretty high speeds and not a lot of pacing although there are quite a few speed changes going on.  Even moving up to the 3/4 next year (said race being 50 minutes) will mean similar dynamics.  But that’s not a bad thing since the duration is closer to my skate races and the dynamics will be the same as well.  But even there a lot of speed changes, surges and slowdowns, etc.  And while finishing the race was never an issue it was clear that my overall approach to preparation did leave me unprepared for some of it.

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Skating Overall Analysis

In hindsight, moving up both in distance and category in the inline races was probably a mistake.  But given my performance in 2010 I had no real indication that it would be.  The first observation I’d make is that the marathon is longer than the half marathon.  Someone should check my math but I think it’s about twice as long.

Of less idiotic relevance is that the duration of the races (jumping from 40 minutes or so for the half) to an hour twenty completely changes the nature of the races as I learned.  A 40 minute event can be done all out because you’re done before you’re cooked. The race dynamics changed significantly moving up the full marathon as there is more pacing, speed changes (especially surges) going on.  And that was something that my mostly steady state training just hadn’t prepared me for, just as on the bike.  I went into the marathon expecting it to be just a longer version of the half-marathon but it was not.

Add to that a big jump in speeds from the half marathon (which is not really raced by the top guys) to the full marathon.  Even in the slower divisions, the speeds are faster and everybody’s game is raised (average speeds jumped from about 20mph to 21-22mph or higher).  Not to mention that the true elites are in the marathon division and some of those guys are just blazingly fast. 

This isn’t helped by the smallness of the sport; in something like cycling, folks tend to move up by Categories (there are 5 categories before you even get to National level) so the speeds tend to increase more gradually.  In skating, it’s pretty much either age group or the open (though Northshore did have the wave thing going on).  So the speeds just take a big jump and I found myself without a pack to skate with.

That was on top of having a general lack of pack skills since I appear to be about the only outdoor inline skater in the city and I do all of my training alone.  And while indoor is always a possibility, that raised other issues that I didn’t want to deal with. 

Recognizing this early on, that prompted me (along with other factors) to go ahead and get into the local cycling scene.   Skating and cycling have always had a lot of crossover, the mechanics and physiology are the same and I’ve used cycling as a form of conditioning for years now.   Give the large Austin cycling community, it just made sense to get into bike racing.

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So What Does This All Tell Me?

Along with other indications (such as my overall power profile on the bike during indoor training), it was clear that this year was marked by good overall endurance and a lack of a top end.   I even did some OCD level race analysis after Chicago, I’ll spare you the numbers but basically, as the race distances went UP (as did speeds) so did my performance and placing went down.  And vice versa: as the distance goes up so does my performance.

Given my inherent physiology, the type of training I tend to be drawn towards, the type of training I tend to default to (and have done for the majority of the two years coming out of the SLC ice experience), this all makes sense.  If I’m built to be anything, it’s to be an aerobic animal and anaerobic type stuff has never been my strong point.  Mind you, not working on it for so long didn’t help.

But that was all part of the learning that came out of this year.  So how do I fix it.

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Looking to 2012 and Beyond

Going forwards, my overall plan, which I have only generally mapped out is to:

1. Continue working on building the aerobic engine.  This is always a priority for this type of racing and will always make up a majority of my training no matter what I’m doing.  Since I’m still targeting races towards the shorter end of things, having the sheer endurance to go hours is less relevant than raising my functional threshold power.

2. Put a lot more concentrated effort into building my top end.  This includes short neuromuscular efforts, longer anaerobic stuff and VO2 max efforts.  It’s all relevant for the type of racing that I’m doing and can only help to pull up my aerobic capacities as well.

3. Move to a more mult-tiered approach to training.  That is, rather than long blocks of pure aerobic work followed by the anaerobic stuff, I’m going to keep a small amount of top end work in pretty much throughout the general prep period.  This is simply a reflection of the years of aerobic work I’ve put in (meaning less ability to improve it by much) on top of the greater general difficulty in improving anaerobic capacities.

Mind you the above has two factors: general physiological development along with specific improvements on skates (where the technical aspects of going fast are just as important as the purely physiological).  The combination of starts and varying distance sprint work on my skates coupled with high intensity conditioning on the bike seemed to be a winning combination this past season once I implemented it.  I’m basing that on the increasing top speeds I was seeing on my skates.

Honestly the only thing I haven’t really resolved is how to optimally balance both skating and cycling.  Certainly there is overalap between the two.  Skaters have always used cycling to build physiological capacities and ice speedskaters often switched to cycling after their ice career ended and did quite well (Eric Heiden was part of the 7-11 Team I mentioned briefly towards the end of the Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting series).

But most don’t try to race both at the same time and figuring out how to prepare for both types of racing along with develop anything (without trying to do everything at once) still hasn’t made itself clear to me.  I may end up doing something akin to what I did this past year, alternating blocks of focus.  That seems the best approach.  Time will tell.

And that brings the 2011 skating season to an end. I’ve spent the entire week following the Northshore disaster not training and eating too much, already I’m getting that inactivity soreness setting in and I may spin on the rollers today.  I’ll have an easy break-in week next week (and hope to ride the Velo in houston) before moving back into normal training and aiming towards the 2012 Road Rash in April.  I’m sure I’ll be prattling about this stuff soon enough.

Following Chicago

Even without having raced the marathon on day 2 of the Tour of Chicago, I was still pretty wrecked.  The 10k and time trial along with the travel had taken it out of me and I took a solid 3 days of doing nothing to recover before sort of jacking around for the rest of the week, just getting back on the bike and on my skates.  I did do the Driveway that Thursday expecting to be fresh for a change but I was just flat and stiff.

At the time I had been focused on entering at least part (if not all) of the 4 day Tour of Austin bicycle race.  It was local, it looked like fun (at least two of the days were at the Driveway where I had been racing) although the two actual crits did scare me since I haven’t done one of those (with true 90 degree crit corners).  With that on the schedule, I had 4 weeks to prepare and I was sort of thinking about how best to do it (especially to handle the multiple days of racing).

 There was still a potential inline race on the schedule, the Northshore Inline Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota.  As it turned out my friend Eva Rodansky from SLC was going to be skating it and that gave me some impetus to do it.  But frankly, I didn’t want to travel again and really had the bike race in the back of my mind. However, as my mentor, who I sometimes wish I didn’t keep around (because he keeps me honest) pointed out if my goal is skating then it makes little sense to put my focus on cycling (even if it’s local and hence ‘more convenient’) pointing out that I had only done one full distance race this season and that it would be better to do the inline marathon. 

I wasn’t happy with it but ultimately he was right.  It also gave me 6 weeks to prepare although it would mean not doing any of the Tour of Austin .  I’d simply do the Driveway series a few more times to finish up my introduction to bike race and then skate and then take my transition period.

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Setting Up the Program

Given my experience in Chicago, it was still clear that while my endurance was good my top speed and acceleration and pack skills were lacking.  And while 6 weeks wasn’t a tremendous amount of time, I saw no reason to at least keep working on my weak points, really looking at 2012.  Effectively I just set up a truncated version of my previous 12 week cycle (split into 6 weeks sprint focus and 6 weeks endurance focus) and did it in 6 weeks split into two three week blocks.

 The first block was just a repeat of my previous sprint block with two sprints days (with starts and acceleration/top speed work) and a couple of slideboard days along with the bike.  I was also doing the Driveway series on Thursday, trying to get more experience and get out of the Cat 5′s.   Originally I planned to go to indoor inline as well to get some pack experience; I went exactly once, caught shit for leaving after warm-ups and just didn’t need the hassle.   I did feel a lot better in the pack that day though and that was enough.  In my skating workouts, I would note that I hit a new top speed PR, 26.8 mph on my 100mm wheels, beating my previous 26.6 PR on my 110′s.  That was promising and told me that at least something about my training was working.

And that was translating to the bike racing anyhow, I kept forcing myself to move up, get into the mix, etc. every time at the Driveway.  And I was starting to get more comfortable in the pack.  I still wasn’t trying to achieve more than just finishing (and not getting tied up in crashes), it didn’t help that the bike race came on my last of a three day block; it was my 5th workout in a row.  So I didn’t have much to give by that night. 

After that block ended, I switched to a 3 week endurance block though I did some different things.  If I’m honest, the Northshore race was sort of an afterthought race as it was; I figured I’d try something different and assumed that the worst I’d do was the same as the previous races.  This was facilitated by my involvement in a cycling study at UT Austin that I got recruited for.

It didn’t really fit my training but I got a free VO2 max test and was getting paid to do essentially the same training I’d have been doing anyway.  But it meant that I could only fit in one long inline skate per week, for a total of three (I was doing all of 20 minutes warm-up before sprints) before the race. The rest of my work was on the slideboard, two sessions of 12X5′/20″ rest or an hour of down time.

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Tapering for the Northshore

I started my taper 10 days out for the Northshore as always, skipping the Driveway that week (there had been a huge crash the week before and I’d already gotten my 10 Cat 5 races so I dodn’t care) and reducing volume.  My last long skate was Saturday, I had the UT bike ride (a hour all-out time trial) on Monday and then cut volume as I went. 

I managed to get an ankle blister the Saturday before the race which was annoying and then I ran into other problems.  I had ruined my good bearings on wet pavement and simply could NOT get a set to spin right.  I serviced three sets of bearings and whereas I could generally get 45 seconds of spin time previously I was getting 10-20 seconds now if I was lucky.  And I couldn’t figure out the problem.

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The Disaster in Duluth

I had one of my typical blitzkreig trips planned, I flew out of Austin Friday morning to Minneapolis, drove up to Duluth to get my hotel with the goal of racing first thing in the morning before driving straight back to the airport for my flight back Saturday afternoon.  I had no intention of staying a second night in Duluth and, even though I have friends to do dog duty, I don’t like to be gone too long.

Shockingly, my travel went perfectly, both flights were on time and outside of some headache with road construction and traffic on a Friday, I got to Duluth fairly early.  I got my race packet, hung out a bit with Eva and that was pretty much the last thing that went right.   I got lost looking for a grocery store, I still couldn’t figure out my bearing issue and I just gave up and went to sleep.

For a 4:30am wake-up call. The race course was point to point, down beside the lake and that meant that we had to go to the finish line and get bussed up to the start line.  I do thank god that I thought to check the weather, because it was COLD up there, 40 degrees or lower and I did pack sweats.  But it wasn’t nearly enough.

We’d sit at the start line picking our butts for about 1.5 hours with everybody freezing their asses off.  I waited a bit too late to get into my skates (because I didn’t want to get cold) and out of my sweats and that truncated my warm-up.  And it hadn’t even occurred to me to pack the tights I have that I can wear under my skinsuit.  I don’t currently own armwarmers; it’s been 90+ every day in Austin, why would this occur to me?

And I never really warmed up during the race.  But that was the least of my worries.  Assuming that the race would go off like my previous races, I had signed up for the elite open, there were also A and B waves (and then masters) starting behind us.  This was a different structure from other races but the only cutoff for elite was finishing a marathon in 1:30 or less. 

I’d done the 28 mile Road Rash in 1:24 and I figured for 1:20 at the marathon distance (i.e. 3 minutes/mile, subtract two miles means a 1:18 marathon).  I also figured that the pro pack would splinter into faster and slower packs like previous races.  And boy was I wrong because at this race the slower packs were in the A and B waves.

Off the start the entire pack went off like a bat out of hell, dropping about 4 of us literally within the first mile which was also uphill.  This was not good.  I worked with one small group for a while, one guy lost his front wheel at mile 3 (he’d skate without it for the rest of the race) and from mile 3 to about, oh, mile 14 I was doing an individual time trial.

And it was going badly.  My bearings were completely wrecking me, I had also thought that the course would be smoother than it was and the wheels I had chosen to run were too hard for the majority of the pavement.   One consequence of this was that I just got my teeth rattled out for most of the race, causing my low back to lock up early (I rarely have problems even with hour-long skates on smooth pavement).

But the combination of the two was completely screwing my technique.  Skating is one of those sports (like swimming and Olympic lifting) where one problem causes a host of others.  But whereas a swimmer can change his technique on the fly and an Ol’er can try to fix the deviation on the next set, my issue was equipment and course based.  And I was screwed. 

I was thrown up on my toes (I could feel the pressure and both of my big toes were bruised after the race) which meant I couldn’t push off my heel and carve properly which meant that my toe was turned out at the end of my push which meant that I couldn’t get an outside edge which meant that I lost a lot of my hip drop.  I also had to sit up and higher to try to get my weight back which meant more aerodynamic resistance.  It was one big disaster and I wasn’t even hitting speeds I’d hit in training easily even putting everything I could into my skates.

At one point I had to pull over as the road conditions were rattling my wheel bolts out, thankfully I had packed an allen wrench.  My hands were so cold I could barely work the wrench, my hands just wouldn’t work. I hit the halfway mark in a time and at average speeds slower than I cruise in training and never have I been so close to just abandoning a race as I was just then.  But I didn’t even see sag or support to get me back to the finish.  So I just kept skating.

The only thing that kept me going was knowing that somewhere behind me were the later packs who were going to catch me that I’d be able to get into to get some rest and draft.  At about mile 14 or 15, the first pack came past me and I couldn’t begin to stay with them.  The second pack blew past me too.  The third pack finally caught me and they were dicking around enough that I was able to finally sit in.  I had given up on racing by this time, I just wanted to finish at this point.

So I sat in for the next 9 miles, finally we got to some smooth pavement where my skates ran at least a little bit better.  Then it would rough up again and I’d run into problems.  I’d just sit in for the next 11 miles or so, at mile 25 we got into this weird grooved pavement and my skates became a problem again.  The pack took off for the finish and I couldn’t be bothered.  I just skated it out.  It wasn’t as if it mattered.

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Post-Race

At the finish line I was still cold, I had never really warmed up and even after 90 minutes of hell my heart rate monitor wasn’t even wet with sweat.  I was shaking from fatigue, had a headache, I was already getting sore muscles (the change in technique had thrown stress to all kinds of new places) and my low back was just destroyed.   My hands were still numb.

I wanted to just collapse out of exhaustion but now I had to go back to the hotel, clean up and drive back to Minneapolis for my flight back.   Thankfully, again, the flights were on time and I got back home at 10:30.  I badly needed dog lovin’ after that and I slept the sleep of a dead man.    As I type this on a Sunday, my low back is still nuked and I can only hope I’m semi-recovered in time to give something approximating my best in the lab tomorrow.

But the race was simply a disaster from start to finish.  If I’m honest, I went into it with a bit of the wrong mentality, I was underprepared physically and mentally but even there I didn’t expect it to go that badly.  On my worst day I should be able to skate a 1:20 marathon and clearly the course was plenty fast as evidence by the speeds of the pro pack.  

Mind you, even with gear that was working, I wouldn’t have stayed with the main pack on my best day (they’d finish in a blazing 1:12 with a European pro apparently taking a flyer at mile 8 to finish by himself in 1:07).   I haven’t looked up finish times for the A or B wave but with gear that worked and starting with them, that’s the group I should have been in (again, I didn’t realize that the split packs I had experience at other races were dealt with here by the waves).

But I am not one to sit around and mope and make no mistake, I’m not trying to blame anybody but myself for the race.  I went in unprepared in a lot of ways and I paid a hard price.  And rather than sit around and complain about my results, I’d rather learn from the experience and fix the problems going forwards; that way I can just make new mistakes next year.  And that’s what I’ll talk about on Friday when I do an overall 2011 season wrap-up to look at what this year taught me about love, life and racing and what I’m going to do going forwards.

Sunday

I slept well enough Saturday night, extreme fatigue will do that too you.  It hadn’t rained although there was more ominous lightning during the night.  Alarm went off at an all too early 6:45am (it takes me about 3 hours to get generally warmed up and race time was at 9:45am).  I cleaned up and ate a small breakfast (protein bar + banana) since blood glucose/glycogen could be an issue for a race this long and had a bunch of water so I’d be hydrated but have time to pee out any extra.   Legs were definitely a touch heavy and I was feeling the two races from yesterday.

As I goofed around on the Internet, the weather was still making grumbling noises, a lot of thunder in the distance.  Weather report called for about a 70% chance of rain between now and the race. In all likelihood, rain wheels or not, I probably wouldn’t race if it was actively raining.  I had done what I mainly came to do (break 20 minutes in the 10k) and had no true desire to suffer through the marathon in the rain.

And as I sat biding my time, the skies started to darken and the thunder started to roll and at 8am the skies opened up and it started raining.  And that was that, mentally I was done.  Checking Weather.com the rain was predicted to continue until at least 11am.  Even if they pushed it back and hoped for it to sunny up, I wouldn’t have time to race, get cleaned up and make my flight.

Judging by the finish times (the race was apparently run), I’m guessing that they waited for it to dry, the speeds were just too fast for it to have been done on slick pavement or while raining.  Based on my time at the Round Rash (1:24 over 28 miles) I was good for a 1:18-1:20 over 26.2 miles.  I’d have finished in the third pack or so (Mantia was again a one man show finishing in 1:09 which is absurd, the next pack was 1:13, some individual stragglers and then a big group in the 1:18-1:20 range) or about the same as at the Road Rash.

To be honest, I wasn’t really disappointed.  I was tired and had already achieved my 16 year old goal of breaking 20 minutes in the 10k.  And gotten a nice road rash scar during the time trial.  That was along with getting a feel for where the elites really are speed wise.  I’d done the marathon at the Road Rash already; if I really felt the need to do anther inline marathon, there were a couple late in the season (along with a half marathon somewhere).   Or not.

Ultimately, I wasn’t anywhere in the running in terms of the placings and suffering for an hour and fifteen minutes for no real return had no appeal to begin with.  Doing it under miserable rain conditions less so.  If I’d had a chance of placing or something, I would have done it if the weather had been good.  But I wasn’t and that wasn’t going to change by racing 26.2 miles in rain on slick pavement at high speeds.  There was simply no real return for what I saw as a lot of risk.   I had a 4-day bike race 5 weeks off, getting injured or beaten up here was pointless.

My main annoyance was  that I couldn’t find an earlier return flight so I was stuck in Chicago twiddling.  I’d have to do some real work or something.  Yeah, right.  So I sat and twiddled, ran around town a bit and then headed back to the airport for the flight home.

Looking Back

So that was the weekend, it was exhausting and despite my low placings and not racing the marathon, I’m overall happy with what happened.   Mainly breaking the 20 minute 10k barrier, that was all I honestly cared about, the time trial was just part of the race and the marathon because I was already there and wanted to a second one.  Realistically, with the level of elite/world champion talent at these races, I had no chance of being anywhere close to the podium in the elite category.

Overall, even without having done the marathon, I can say I raced to the best of my ability.  I’ll do a much longer post-season analysis once I finish the bike race but I can see that I’m basically in this weird gray area, better than the advanced category but getting shelled by the elites.  For now, I can live with that; I’d rather get hammered by the best than sandbag the rest.

The issue I’m running into is that skating isn’t like cycling where there is a bit more gradual move-up (so you move from Cat 5 to 4 and then to 3 and things just get gradually faster).  There is just this massive jump in ability from one group (advanced men) to the next (elite men).  Even the masters elites (who were often top skaters while younger) are moving.  I’m too fast for the group behind me but not able to keep up with the group in front of me.   I need something in the middle…or to get faster.

Ultimately, I still carried the same basic strengths and weaknesses into this event.  My pack skills are still limiting although, realistically, I wouldn’t have stayed with the main pack even if I had gotten pushed out of the pack on the first climb in the 10k.    My endurance is fine, I still lack a top end even if it does appear to be gradually improving (top speed is far harder to improve).  This mirrors my bike performance, my 20 and 60′ wattages are far stronger than my 1′ and 5′ powers. Given my physiology and training to date, that all makes sense.  It also points to what I’ll be working on throughout the winter.

But I’m nothing if not process oriented.  I gave both races I did my all, I left nothing on the course (except some skin in the time trial).  I have my strengths and weaknesses and I know how to go about fixing them.  Chicago is in the past, now it’s time to face forwards.

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Looking Forwards

And that’s that.  I flew back to Austin Sunday after the race, exhausted but pleased and the soreness set in hard Monday morning.  I was happy to get back, I do badly enough out of my pattern/comfort zone and I was having dog separation anxiety after 2 days apart.  I had two good (dog owner) friends watching the fort but I still wanted to be back.

I’d take the nex t3 days off from training (including Sunday) to rest, recover and eat too much.   Between travel and racing in the heat, I needed a bit of a break to relax and recover and I learned the hard way in 2010 what happens when I jump back in after racing.   Today I’ll spin on the rollers to get my legs woken back up to start the next training  block.  I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do to prepare for the bike race beyond knowing it will involve more time at the Driveway. I may even race tomorrow night, I’m not sure yet.  In any case, I’ll map it out today.

The Tour de Austin, a 4 day Omnium bike race (consisting of a 4 mile time trial, 50 minute pack race and two 30 minute crits) is in 5 weeks which gives me time for one targeted training block and a taper. So I have to train for that, get my last 4 Category 5 bike races (at the Driveway series) under my belt so I can move up to Cat 4 and see what I can do.  Then it’ll be time for a short 2 week transition period before I start the next build towards 2012.  I’m sure I’ll do a global lookback at the season then.

Friday

I slept like a log Thursday night and this was actually a weird weekend sleep wise. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I tend not to sleep on the night before a race but so long as I got a good night’s sleep the night before the night before I’m fine.  The problem being that I was racing two days in a row.  I was worried that a bad night’s sleep tonite would affect me on Sunday.   Mind you, this wasn’t worth putting much mental energy into; I couldn’t do anything about it.

I puttered around the house Friday morning, dealt with dog stuff and did one last equipment check; I’m always worried about forgetting something and that’s where I get a little bit OCD about it, checking and rechecking.  I had my main skates with the 110 mm wheels (and the wheels I’d skated Thursday) and just in case of rain, I packed my 100mm frames as well (along with some normal 100mm race wheels); I have some wheels that supposedly run on wet pavement.  I had some extra bearings to dick around with those as well.

Travel, as always was a nightmare.  Between a weather delay and then sitting on the runway for an hour waiting for something to let us leave, it was mainly frustrating.  I truly hate traveling of late for this reason but driving the 15 hours would have been too exhausting.  Not that I didn’t still consider it if only to avoid dog separation anxiety.

The upshot was that I rolled into Chicago at 4pm, by the time I got my bags and my rental car, it was rush hour.  Joy.  So I ground my way down to the event site to get my race packet and find the actual race course even if all I wanted to do was go to the hotel.  Glad I did too, where we picked up the packets was NOT where the race was going off.  I went to the actual race site and got a chance to check out some of the course.  The pavement wasn’t as smooth nor as flat as the event site had led me to believe but I had made the right wheel selection anyhow.

I got to the hotel, checked in and then it was time to go in search of food.  I didn’t really want to spend the entire weekend living on synthetic food of the protein bar and fruit variety (it gives me gas) but neither did I want something heavy in my stomach.  I ended up at Applebee’s but ended up walking out when they couldn’t figure out where to bring my damn food.  A sandwich and fruit from Walmart would have to do and I stocked up on food for both Saturday and Sunday along with sodas and such.

I did one last skate check, tightening bolts and setting everything out so that I’d be ready.  The one ‘nice’ thing about the first day is that the 10k pack race didn’t go off until 12:50pm.  I certainly wouldn’t be dealing with an early morning.  Of course, the drawback was that they had called for a heat warning; it’d be HOT. But I was nothing if not adapted, Austin summer had been brutal and that I was used to.  I feel bad for anybody who shows up to this shindig without being heat acclimated and I bet some people drop during the running events.

Somehow, the Tour De France was on tv so I watched a bit of that for motivation before taking a short walk to stretch my legs and then heading to bed.  While walking, I saw some ominous looking lightening in the distance.  Uh oh.  And weather.com was calling for a chance of rain.

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Saturday Morning

I slept shockingly well given it was the night before a race.  Maybe I’m just getting old.  However I was awoken during the night to my worst fear: rain.  Got up that morning and the pavement was soaked and it was still drizzling.  This isn’t good as urethane skate wheels and water don’t work well unless you define ‘well’ as ‘having your skate slide away from you every time you try to push.  The runners wouldn’t have too much of an issue but we would.

However, as I noted above, I had brought my 100mm frames just in case with some wheels that are supposed to run on wet pavement (I’m told they actually work but have never had an opportunity to test them).   The weather report said it was supposed to sunny up at 9am and if it did, it should burn everything off by the time the 10k went off. So I sat around and waited before I did anything to my skates.  And as I kept pounding refresh on the weather report, they kept pushing back the sun until past the 10k start time.  Shit.

Just in case, I headed down to the race course early.  Mainly I wanted to see if the first event had been pushed back at all. While things were a bit late there was no indication that the event as a whole was being moved.  I also saw the same familiar faces from the Road Rash: Mantia, Stelly, etc.  It’s a pretty small sport that way.

I asked Justin if he was running Storm Surge wheels and he said yes.  Another guy said they were night and day on wet pavement (but run terribly on dry pavement).  Sadly, none of the vendors had thought to bring them in 110mm size.  Gahh, it’s been sunny and cool in Chicago for weeks and it rains this weekend with a heat warning.  So I headed back to the hotel to obsessively watch the weather report and then make my final decision about equipment.

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The 10k

As of 11:30 it didn’t look like it was going to clear and the 10k was supposed to go off at 12:50. Just in case, I took my 110′s out into the hotel parking lot and they would not run on the wet pavement.  So I quit dithering and put my 100mm frames and Storm Surge wheels on.  Headed back to the course and, just in case, took my normal race wheels.

And once I got there it was drying out, slowly and the folks I had talked to were switching back to normal race wheels.  Gah.  Which meant that I could have raced on the 110′s but I didn’t even bring them as I wouldn’t have had time to do another frame and wheel switch and warm-up.  So it was the 100′s with normal race wheels.  Which was fine.

It’s not as if I’ve found the 110′s to be massively superior to the 100′s.  At best they are a touch faster and more efficient but that’s it; at worst they are a touch more unstable for me.  And while I’ve skated the 110′s for the last 6 weeks exclusively, frankly the 100′s just ‘felt’ better somehow even not having been on them for so long.  More stable, more solid.

It’s hard to explain, probably a function of being a bit lower to the ground.  Just more stable overall and I’d be willing to sacrifice a touch of top speed for more stability given the nature of the race and the slickness of the pavement.  The course was a slightly less than 1 mile loop and we’d do it 6 times.  A couple of hardish corners but nothing too serious.  And mostly dry except for some patches of water that we had to skate through.

There were about 30 of us in the elite group and we went last.  As usual, I just started in back so I wouldn’t get tangled up in the mix of guys trying to run.  Things started off fairly calmly, around the roundabout and out the first straight until we hit the first uphill.  The pavement certainly had some wet spots (and invariably big pools of water in the corners) and I was extra careful to stay more on top of my skates when pushing through water (or just roll through it).  I started to move up the line from the back and got boxed in, had to step up onto a raised center pavement piece to avoid getting tangled up.  I still won’t establish my space well.

By the time I got back down, I was off the back and didn’t have the gas to catch the main line. It wouldn’t have mattered, I still don’t have the motor to stay with the fastest guys (the same world class guys from the Road Rash were here again).  Not yet anyhow.  Another winter of development on my power outputs (and speed work on my inlines) and a touch lighter and I think I can do it.

I passed one guy and bridged to another, then a third.  Eventually ended up in a small pack of 3 with all of us working together for the second half of the race.    Around and around we went with nothing really changing except switching off leads.  They were wearing the same jerseys so they were teammates and we weren’t going too hard since there wasn’t any chance of catching the main pack at this point.  We weren’t dawdling but we weren’t going balls out either.

On the last lap, I tried to drop them on the climb but it was clear I couldn’t crack them so I backed off; no point wasting energy where it didn’t matter and dragging them up the hill.  We came into the final sprint and I just let them go.  It wouldn’t have impacted anything in the big scheme of things and it wasn’t worth wasting energy or crashing to try to improve my placings by one or two spots.  I also just don’t have the sprint at this point to make it worth my while.

Overall I was happy with how I raced even if my placing was low; this is my first year in the elites and I’m at least hanging in with the back group.  Of far more importance than my placings was this: since my mid-20′s, I have been tortured by not ever having skated a sub 20 minute 10k. I’ve mentioned having some ‘unfinished business’ with this distance and that was it.  I was always close but couldn’t ever break through the 20 minute barrier when I raced in my 20′s before I ‘retired’ the first time.

And for literally 16 years it’s bugged the ever-loving shit out of me that I had never done it; given the lack of 10k races, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get a chance (part of why doing this event was so important to me).   So I just went ahead and did it today at age 41.  My 10k time (adjusted for the slightly shorter nature of the course) would have been 18:36 (based on an average speed of 20.0 mph exactly, top speed of 26.8mph) and I can live with that.  I also saw an average heart rate of 183 and a max of 193.  I definitely didn’t hold anything back.  Here’s the Garmin output for speed and heart rate.

This can't possibly be healthy.

I dragged myself to the car, went back to the hotel to change into a fresh skin suit and get a little break.  Did a bit of PNF stretching to loosen everything up and even considered remounting my 110′s but just didn’t bother.  Probably best given the nature of the time trial course (which I only found out after making the decision).  I didn’t really have time anyhow and might as well stick with what’s comfortable.  In about an hour and a half it would be time to go again.

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The 2 Mile Time Trial

To be honest I wasn’t sure what to expect from this, never done one on inlines and it’s not quite the same as the ice.  After my brief rest, I got back to the race site and checked out the course beforehand.  Glad I did, it was…interesting.  Actually, I’ll be honest, it was kind of screwed up.  I was told afterwards that they wanted to make it technical but it was just laid out strangely.  And by strangely I mean stupidly.

We’d start into half of a roundabout, long gradual downhill into a 180 turnaround. This is hard to do on inlines, no brakes and you will crash if you don’t slow down.   Back up the gradual uphill, through the turnaround to another long straight.  Another 180 degree turn and back.  Then a hard right into an uphill into another right into a short steep climb.  Which meant you couldn’t carry much speed into it. Then it got truly stupid as we went into a dark, slick, rippled pavement underground parking garage with a 90 degree right into a 90 degree left.  Back out into a screaming downhill to a hard right to the finish.  Seriously, just make it out and back or something.  There were plenty of good roads to be had; we’d just raced them during the 10k.

I predicted that someone would crash on this course.  Turned out I was right…..

We went in the reverse order of the finish for our category which meant I was second in line for the elite men.   My ideal goal was to catch the guy in front of me and NOT get caught by the guy behind me.   And, of course, skate well.  I had warmed up and went to the line.  10 second countdown and off.  I didn’t really run off the line, no point trying to make up a few tenths and risking a slip or fall or crash.  It was a brisk skate into the turnaround as I built my speed and tried to settle into a nice rhythm.

Everything went more or less fine and I handled everything about how I expected.  Down the gradual downhill, drag a skate, make the turnaround, back up the hill, around the roundabout, out and back again.  I kept up my speed on the climb well, all that bike work has paid off.  And was concerned as I entered the parking garage.  And rightfully so. I lost my push and my skate slipped.  Yeah, that’s right, I was the one who crashed, nailing my left shin, upper thigh and glute as always.   Dammit.

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You covet my socks..

The hair shorts cannot be unseen.

I got up pissed and took off, with a monster pain in….well, to be blunt, in my butthole.  A buddy of mine had actually torn his rectum crashing his bike 20 years ago sliding on his glute and I was worried I had done it too.  I hadn’t so far as I could tell as the pain went away pretty quickly.  So I skated it out and finished just avoiding getting caught by the guy who started behind me.  I wasn’t really sure what to expect time wise out of this given the hill nature and the turnaround.  Whatever, I survived it and that was fine.  Finish time: 6:13 with an average speed of 18.3 mph and a top speed of 23.  Average heart rate 177 and max of 183.  Here’s the Garmin, you can see the crash where speed takes a big hit.

Oww, my leg.

I had a protein bar and a banana to start recarbing/recovering and then it was back to the hotel.   It was time to rest, eat and try to recover for the hell of the marathon tomorrow.   Which I’ll talk about in Part 2 of this race report since this is too long as it is.

Read Tour of Chicago: 2011 Race Report Part 2.

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Notes: IL = inline, B = bike, SB = slideboard.

Today I’ll look at how the block actually progressed week by week (or didn’t), note anything of interest and talk about my final taper to the Chicagoland Inline Marathon..  More specifically, I was doing the Tour of Chicago, 3 races across two days consisting of a 10k pack race Saturday morning, a 2 mile individual time trial Saturday afternoon and the full Marathon pack race on Sunday.  It was going to be a hell of a weekend that was for sure and it required that I develop pretty much every physiological system as well as I could.

As I noted in an earlier part I had set some specific goals in terms of the wattages I wanted to hit on the bike (I had less of a feel for where I might get on my skates in terms of top end speeds) and had one specific body composition/body weight goal.  For the most part I hit them although this was backtracked by an equipment issue in Week 3 that I’ll mention below.  My overall goal was to be stronger (wattage and speed wise) at a lower body weight/body fat than I’d ever been.   Now let me look at each week of the block and what happened or didn’t as the case may be.

Week 1

Week 1 was just the reintroduction of actual long skating and it was clear that first Tuesday that my specific endurance on my skates was down.  This is pretty normal, skate specific endurance goes away quickly but comes back quickly.  I had skated the Veloway which is the harder of my two courses, my low back fatigued pretty quickly and that workout kicked my ass.  I was cooked at 40 minutes.  The Tuesday night and Wednesday morning workouts went fine as did Thursday’s inline sprint workout.

Thursday night, it was time for my first night at the Driveway series (and only my second bike race ever after the disastrous Ronde Von Manda much earlier this year).  I was a bit nervous but it was time to get into the mix.  I have a couple of acquaintances who race regularly and they gave me some input; the race also has mentors in the back of the noob race where is where I had every intention of staying.

My goal the first week was simply to race the distance, not crash or mess anybody else up and get a feel for bike racing; I planned to stay in the back and just get used to the whole thing.  I also wanted to make sure and learn at least one new thing at every race since this was as much for experience as anything else.   And that I did.   My warm-up was wrong for the style of racing and I identified a weird weak point: I get dropped on downhills.  I’m light and if I don’t catch a draft my lack of weight hurts me.

Saturday’s workouts were fine, inline went as well as it could and I hammered myself with short 30 and 60 second intervals on the bike for anaerobic power.  The Sunday long slideboard workout was simply boring although….hang on that’s week 2.

Week 2

While I can’t say whether it was the combination of the entirety of the weekend or just Sunday, the long slideboard workout just flat out wrecked me with soreness, especially in my glutes.  A bit odd given that it was the lowest intensity workout of the week.  But even that told me that something about putting in the duration was valuable.   But I was pretty wrecked that Tuesday.

I added some time to my inline skate and Tuesday’s intervals went pretty well although it was going to be a stretch to hit the goal I wanted to hit.  Wednesday was fine, the sprint workout was fine and I was raring to go for Thursday’s bike race.

The Driveway series changes the course every week and this week’s was much easier (from a technical standpoint) and I was better prepared mentally and physically.  I figured out how not to get dropped on the downhill and actually raced well, finishing solid mid-pack (which was my goal).  In hindsight, I should have gone for more but I’m still hesitant about being right in the mix when it’s fast.  Until I’m more confident, I just hang out in back where it’s arguably far more dangerous because the riders in back tend to have worse handling skills.

The biggest thing about that race was that the pack was just insane.  The entire pack kept sitting up at the bottom of the downhill after racing down it and everyone would get jammed up. I had to slam on my brakes a number of times; once a guy rode up on my rear wheel, bending my derailleur.  I also overlapped wheels and the race finished with a huge crash on the last straight.  I stayed out of it.  When I took my bike in to get the derailleur fixed, I had them drop the handlebars a notch.  I’ll come back to this.

Saturday and Sunday were just more standard workouts, long inline, short bike intervals and then the long slideboard workout which would wreck me yet again.

Week 3

I was already feeling pretty beaten up going into Week 3, I knew this would be a hard cycle and I opted to make it an unloading week.  I maintained some intensity but cut the volumes back on Tuesday’s interval workout and my Thursday sprint workout on skates.  I also hit a huge speed PR on my skates.  Whether it was because I was rested or just a delayed effect from the previous block, my top speed on my inlines took a huge jump from 25.3 mph to 26.6mph.  I was thrilled to see it.

I got my bike fixed in time for the race but mentally and physically I just wasn’t there.  The course was much more technical (with a monster 120 degree corner that caught up a bunch of people).  I was hesitant, I didn’t work to stay with the pack and I simply finished as best as I could which wasn’t very well.  Once you’re off the back, you’re mostly boned. I did get some good feedback from the mentor but I was cooked and just rode out the distance.

I had also noticed during my workouts that everything felt harder on the bike, my heart rate was higher at every wattage. Whether it was fatigue or the change in handlebar position I couldn’t tell but something felt different. I cut the volume on Saturday night as well.  Sunday was the same 90 minutes on the slideboard.

Week 4

I felt much better going into Week 4 after the unload, my skating specific endurance was back and the Sunday slideboard session wasn’t wrecking me quite so hard which told me I was adapting to it.  I was still having the same feeling of increased effort on the bike.  Given that my skate performances were staying stable or improving, I attributed this to the handlebar shift rather than general fatigue or overtraining.  I’d have exepected everything to fall off if the second were going on.

For those not familiar with cycling, if you’re wondering why drop the handlebars at all the reason is this: presumably it’s a bit more aero, cutting drag from the wind. But it does change your body position and there is an adaptation period from a muscular and neuromuscular standpoint; your torso is lowered, so there’s more hip flexion, that sort of thing.

Hopefully I’d get back to my old wattages in the new more aero position and be faster in the long term.    A lower torso position is also arguably more similar to skating anyhow.  From a transfer standpoint, I needed to be strong in that position for it to really help with skating.  I should really be on aero bars and actually used to ride my power trainer in true aero position in SLC for that reason.

But I definitely felt it on Tuesday’s interval workout and made some adjustments, actually focusing on pure threshold work and moving the VO2 max intervals to Saturday.  On the Thursday sprint workout, as much as I wanted to keep chasing new top speeds, the reality is that it wasn’t useful.  I needed to focus on speed endurance so I cut the repeats down to three, cut the speed down and went longer.  Maintenance sucks.

Thursday’s bike race was about the same.  Whether fatigue, the handlebars or the combination I was cooked.  The course was long and fairly non-technical but everybody was all over the place again.  One guy crashed right next to me, another nearly took me down with a stupid line.  With 2 laps to go, I was cooked and the mentor even told me that I needed to get up to the front of the pack to stay out of the mess in back.

About this time I also got my new toy, a brand spanking new set of TruTrainer bike rollers.  This is a terrifying device used by cyclists to work on their spin and line.  You’re balanced up on these metal rollers and it’s oh so easy to fall off.  I had tried these back in high school and nearly killed myself.  I wanted a pair now for winter training, to improve my line and spin and because they are cool as hell.

The model I got is a bit easier due to a nifty flywheel inside the rear roller.  I would start to gradually incorporate them into my training, for warm-up and cool-down before the slideboard workout for example and use them more as I got used to them. Here’s a short video me on them, the hardest part is still starting and clipping in and I cut the first missed attempt.

Week 5

I was starting to feel a bit beaten up again going into Week 5 but I had to press on, I was almost there.  My skate specific endurance was back where it needed to be and I kept pushing the threshold work on Tuesday.  Gradually I felt like my bike wattages were coming back a bit, I figured it would take a solid 6 weeks to adjust to the new handlebar position.  I was off of my power goals but as the saying on the power list is: you can only do what you can do.

I moved to 45 full minutes on the rollers for my Wednesday easy recovery workout. I still have to figure out how to drink and towel off on the damn things; that’s why I was playing around with taking one hand off the bars in the video above.  My Thursday sprint workout went just fine and I was working on pacing at sub-maximal speeds over distances rather than top speed.

I really didn’t want to race Thursday night, not only was I cooked but getting injured in the craziness of the pack 2 weeks out was a danger I had to consider. Sadly, I had put myself in a dilemma having to do with upgrading to Category 4 (which requires 10 total races) in time for the Tour of Austin.

It turned out that the course that night was the easiest course, which I had done well on in Week 2.  So I dragged msyelf out there, raced aggressively but conservatively, predicted a big crash on the last lap on the right hand side of the course, and stayed way left so I didn’t get caught in it when it happened just as I expected.  I wouldn’t be racing in Week 6.

Both the Saturday and Sunday workouts went as expected, I did my last hard workout at the Veloway and ground out an hour with some decent speeds (it’s a hillyish course so my average tends to be lower than I’d hope).  On the flats I was regularly seeing 20mph pretty easily and Chicago would be flat.  By the time I ground through Sunday’s final 90 minute slideboard workout I was ready to start my taper.

Week 6

My final full volume workouts were on Tuesday of Week 6.  I put in an hour skating on my easier course (it’s flatter and more like Chicago will be) and then ground through the threshold workout, hitting 1X20′ at goal, 2X5′ at a higher wattage and a final hard 3′ effort.  And I was cooked.  I had also noticed that my HR/wattage relationships were back where they more or less belonged; mental note it takes me 3.5 weeks to adjust to a change in bike position.  Then, as the saying goes, the hay was in the barn and it was time to rest.  I had done the work, hit my goals (mostly) and it was time to rest and taper.

Wednesday was an easy spin on the rollers.  On Thursday morning I cut my sprint volume to 4 total starts and 2X1′ race pace intervals.  Thursday night was just an easy hour aerobic spin.  No way was I racing.  For both mental, physiological and safety reasons.

That Saturday, finally, after fighting with it for the better part of 6 weeks, I solved a long-standing skate equipment problem and thank god for that.  I made my 45′ workout on inlines, my speeds were good as was my endurance. Everything felt good and my legs didn’t have that warmed over jello feeling so badly anymore.  After a long special volunteer event, I hammered out three VO2 max intervals on the bike on Saturday since that’s the closest physiological system to the 2mile time trial.  The slideboard was cut to 60 minutes on Sunday, thank god.

The Final Week

I’d continue to cut volume and intensity into the final week.   I did a mere 2 laps on my course on Tuesday but hit the highest speeds I’d hit this block, 45′ aerobic that evening on the bike was sufficient.  Another 45′ on the rollers Wednesday.

I did things a bit differently this time around for my final skate workout, mainly revolving around equipment.  I set up my skates with the same wheels and bearing I intended to race on.  Since the wheels were new, I wanted to get some of the slick urethane off of them.  I also didn’t want to be surprised (as I had been at Napa in 2010) if they grabbed the pavement differently.  Everything went perfectly at that workout, I hit my highest average speed of the block, nailed both starts and hit exactly the average I had been trying to dial in on the one interval I did.  30′ on the rollers that night would round it out.

Friday is a travel day and I’ll go scope out the course and get my race packet and stuff.  If I can find a gym close, I’ll go do 20′ easy aerobic work to loosen up.  Or just go for a walk.  The full final 2 weeks of training with the 10 day taper (Starting Wednesday) appears below.

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Notes: IL = inline, B = bike, R = rollers, SB = slideboard

If your’e wondering if I did anything specific dietarily (people always seem to ask) the answer is not really.  I emphasized a bit more carbs (but had to be careful of my tendency to over-consume given my reduced training volume, I had worked too hard to reduce my weight/body fat for this to pig out in the last few days when my activity was low) but that was about it.  I wouldn’t need to be carb-loaded for the 10k or 2 mile and would have to worry more about recovery day to day to make sure I didn’t run out of gas on Sunday.  I also bumped my potassium to make sure there’d be no issues with cramping.

And that’s where we stand.  I’ve got my gear, I’m rested, I’m stronger and more well rounded than I was earlier this year or last and I’m lighter/leaner than I’ve been in as long as I can remember. I’m as prepared as I’m going to be. Tomorrow, the fun begins.

Read Tour of Chicago: Race Report Part 1

In short I had decided that I had a power/top speed problem along with some skills deficits and had divided my training into two 6 week blocks with a bike focus in the first 6 weeks and a skate focus in the second six weeks.  The focus was on driving up my power outputs on the bike (with some targeted interval and tempo work) along with some neuromuscular work on my skates for top speed and sprinting (essentially to teach my body how to use increased power outputs skating at high speeds).  In those articles, I laid out my specific training and the progress I made over the first 6 week block.  Read ‘em.

And now it’s time for the next update.  Specifically I’ll you how and why I laid out my second six week block and taper leading up into the Chicagoland race and I’ll do this partly today finishing up on Friday.  First  I want to talk about the event itself, what implications that had for my training, and what I did and why during the weeks leading up to it.  Of course, I’ll talk about what worked, what didn’t and there will be a race report forthcoming once I get back from the Windy City.

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The Tour of Chicago

The Chicagoland Inline Marathon actually consists of several different events (ranging from fun skates to the individual marathon); more interesting to me was an event it included called the Tour of Chicago.  This was an event that in cycling is called an Omnium (an event including a bunch of different types of racing) and specifically in this case it included three races across two days.  If nothing else this would make travelling worthwhile.  Here are the events that comprise the tour.

The first race is a 10k pack race on Saturday.  This was part of the draw of the event for me since I’ve been wanting to do a 10k inline race for over a decade for personal reasons.  And, as it turned out, the Atlanta event that normally is the only 10k in the country got cancelled this year (which was good for me since I wanted to do the Tour De Austin bike race locally the same weekend).  The second race is a 2 individual mile time trial done a few hours after the 10k on Saturday.  Finally the full marathon would be raced Sunday morning with the overall results being based on placing in each of the three events. This would be a hellish weekend no matter how you cut it.

If nothing else, this meant that, along with the weaknesses I was trying to fix, I would have to prepare a bit more comprehensively for this event due to the differences in races and what they would require.   At least travelling would be worth it.  Let me look at each event briefly.

Average 10k times are in the 15-16 minute range (the world record is something insane like 13 minutes) and it’s basically all out from the gun to the tape.  I anticipated a sprint start into a consistent effort at or even slightly above lactate threshold probably ending in a pack sprint unless someone managed to get away.  It’d be fast and hard but over quickly.  This would rely primarily on my 20′ power/FTP levels with both the fast start and any sprint I can eke out at the end.

The 2 mile time trial should have a finish time in the 4-6 minute range depending on the skater.  That would mean a hard start/fast acceleration to get up to speed and then what would be a pure Vo2 max effort for the distance (VO2 max can be sustained for 5-8 minutes) with a surge at the end to finish strong.

Finally is the marathon, an hour fifteen or so of hell with what I expected to be similar race dynamics to the Road Rash.  A fast start to get out of the pack (at least they would be racing different groups at different times here), some bits of sitting in, some accelerations and breaks, too much time at or near threshold leading most likely into a final pack sprint.  This would require a bit of everything including endurance, threshold, covering breaks, the fast start, and any sprint finish.

Now, in Omnium type events, the overall placings are determined by how you do in each individual event.  In this case, points were given out for placings in each event and tallied up.  As well, placing in the 10k determined what position you started the time trial in.

Make no mistake, after the events of the Road Rash I had no real ideas of being anywhere in the placings, my top speed and such still needed too much work to get me there in the elite category.  But I certainly wanted to do my best at each of the events if I was bothering to make the trip and race them all.

What this all meant was that I had to train to cover a lot of eventualities in terms of different types of training and racing.  It was sort of a lucky coincidence as it all sort of fit in with what I was trying to improve anyhow.

To whit, my overall endurance and sustainability/aerobic engine were more than fine since that had been my focus for so long.  I simply needed the sprint, threshold, top speed and VO2 max efforts which were all aspects of building my top end that I’d been focusing on anyhow.   Assuming I survived the second training block, I’d come out of it a lot more well rounded skater (and cyclist) than I had been at the Road Rash.  All of this nonsense this year had also made me reassess what I’d do going into the 2012 season but that’s another article for another day.

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The Training Plan

As I mentioned above (and detailed in Methods of Endurance Training: 2011 Season Part 12), I had divided up my 12 weeks of training into two six week blocks with the first 6 weeks focused on the bike and now it was time to set things up for the more skate specific training while working on everything I needed to work on.

That meant redeveloping at least some skate-specific endurance for the marathon distance (while my general endurance was unaffected, skate specific stuff goes away pretty quickly) along with continuing to work on starts/acceleration and top speed (although of secondary importance).

I’d continue to use the bike for some physiological development and was going to start regular bike racing for both race/pack experience and to get in one hell of a good workout.  As driven as I am, pushing myself to my limits training by myself is far more difficult than in a race situation; simply, racing brings out your best (this is why most athletes use early races to really get into form).

My previously weekly schedule, consisting of 5 training days per week (and 8 total training units) seemed to have worked pretty well from an overall workload/recovery standpoint, especially given that one of the days/week was more or less active recovery.  I had adapted to the training load and only felt beaten up right about the time I wanted to deload.  So I opted to stick with that and plugged in my workouts as follows.   I’ll look at the purpose and sequencing of each afterwards.

Notes: B = bike, IL = inline, SB = slideboard

Monday and Friday remained my days off although I usually used those to take ALFIE! on an extra long walk and/or go the Austin Humane Shelter for an extra shift.  That got me some active recovery and I’m one of those people who sticks to their eating patterns better on days with at least something approximating exercise.  He didn’t mind the extra activity either although it’s awful hot.

Tuesday and Saturday morning were my key inline workouts with the primary focus on duration; as I’ve noted skating puts me pretty much at tempo intensity unless I skate in such a way as to do really strange things technically or go pointlessly slow.  It’s just that kind of sport (apparently kayaking is similar).  Both workouts have elements of Fartlek and speed changes as well just as a function of the courses.  It’s not just steady state skating even if that’s more or less what I shoot for.

Tuesday’s bike ride was true threshold work bordering on VO2 max work.  Rather than work from the bottom up which was grinding me down mentally and physically (60-90 minutes tempo indoors is just awful), I opted to start at a higher intensity and try to add time and/or increase the wattage (moving towards true VO2 max intensities) or both.

Wednesday was just basic aerobic maintenance, 60-90 minutes at aerobic intensities.  A combination of endurance maintenance, recovery and just to burn a shedload of calories (since I was still working towards a specific body composition/body weight goal).  I dropped the high speed spinning, my legs were usually torched and I felt that I had gotten all out of the drills that I had to get out of them.

Thursday’s morning inline sprint workout was pretty much what I had done in the previous block: a short warm-up to 3 crazy starts, 3 standing starts and then 6 interval repeats with full rest to work on acceleration and top speed.  I’d increase the length of the intervals and cut volume over the block to work more on speed endurance.

Thursday night was the Driveway Series, a local pseudo-crit (it’s held on a car race course and there are few true crit corners) held every week here in Austin.  The Cat 4/5 race is 30 minutes so I’d warm-up for about 30 minutes, do the race and and then cool down for another 10 minutes.  The race is fast and hard and includes some sprints, climbs, some anaerobic stuff, puts me in the pack.  Just pure racing and a great workout to boot.

It wasn’t ideal doing it after a morning sprint workout (or at the end of the three day block) but since bike racing is secondary for me right now, I didn’t mind this taking a hit to put my sprint workout where I wanted it.  I was using it as much to get in a good quality workout with race dynamics as to actually race and be competitive.

Saturday’s bike workout was more intervals although at a reduced volume since I was getting interval work on Thursday morning on my skates and more quality work in the race on Thursday night; I was just distributing my total volume across the workouts.  I wanted to keep building towards my 1′ power goal to keep pulling my fitness ‘up’ from the top end and keep developing my relatively weak anaerobic power/capacity (this has become a new very long-term goal since it’s limiting me).

Finally was Sunday.  In the previous block this had been a group bike ride but I decided to make it another skating day although indoors on the slideboard.  I knew I’d be too trashed for another group bike ride (my training was already high on intensity) and since I can’t skate outdoors at a low heart rate, I decided to keep this inside.  Basically, it was my skating equivalent of the ‘long run’ that marathoners do.

It would also get me used to skating two days in a row (and tired after a Saturday morning skate and afternoon bike ride).  If nothing else my low back needed the stress to be ready to survive Chicago and this was a form of race modeling (shorter skate Saturday morning, intervals Saturday night, long skate Sunday morning).

Admittedly, the above schedule was going to be tough.  I had three hard days (Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday), two easy days (Wednesday/Sunday) and two days off which I hoped I’d survive.  But it was also a short training block and you can get away with a lot in the short-term.  And having learned my lesson, even as I drew it up I had no problem inserting a relative recovery week in the middle if I needed it.

And I’ll cut things here today.  On Friday, I’ll talk about how the block went and my taper going into Chicago.  Then, another exciting race report.  Or something.

Read Methods of Endurance Training: 2011 Season Part 14

Today I’ll talk about the training I set up and why I did it the way I did it along with talking about the last 6 weeks of training (as I type this I’m finishing the first half of this macrocycle) and what happened good or bad.  I’ll note here that the pack skill issue was, to me, a secondary issue to the speed/acceleration issue.

Frankly, whether or not I had good pack skills wouldn’t matter if I didn’t have the top speeds and acceleration abilities to stay with the pack I wanted to be in in the first place.  So while it was something I clearly needed work on, improving my top speed and acceleration were of higher priority.  To be honest, some of this probably just represented the fact that it would be easier to work on physiological stuff in the short-term.

Fixing top speed meant focusing on two primary issues: sheer top end power output along with the neuromuscular skills needed to go fast.  The power outputs could be developed on the bike, the skill work would have to be done skating.  Again I had a final issue of trying to integrate the bike and skate training without blowing myself up.   Today I want to look at the plan I set up based on these goals, why I set up things the way I did and the results from my first 6 week block of training.

The Overall Plan

As always, I worked from the top down first outlining the entire block between the Road Rash and the Chicago race.    As it turned out, following my half-week/week of recovery following the Road Rash, the Chicago race fell 13 weeks later.  That would give me almost exactly 12 full weeks of training into a taper (the Chicago race was on the weekend at the end of week 13).  So I had 12 weeks of effective training and that represented my macrocycle.

As much for symmetry as anything, I split this straight down the middle into two 6 week mesocycles (I briefly considered splitting it into an 8/4 split for reasons I now forget).  During the first 6 weeks, I was going to focus on the bike in terms of power outputs (both functional threshold stuff along with top end) and cut back my skating durations to focus on speed work.

The focus on my skates would primarily be on shorter stuff more for neuromuscular skill than anything else.  Not only would this take less out of my legs (compared to skating 45-90 minutes at what amounts to tempo intensity), it was a nice mental break from just grinding mileage all the time.  I kept in one longer skate workout for endurance maintenance.

The second 6 week block would switch the focus more to skating (since I was preparing for a skate race, remember and still needed to put in the time/distance on my skates) moving back into more distance training and hopefully converting some of the improve power outputs from the bike and speed work into faster speeds and better overall, well…everything. I was also going to start including a local weekly race (a pseudo-crit called the Driveway Series) as a way to get not only some good quality work but also help with pack skills.

So in chart form, the entire period looked like this:

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Where the date indicates the Monday of that week.

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The Weekly Plan

So now I had to plan out the first 6 week mesocyle in terms of the weekly schedule.  Since I wasn’t lifting, the only limitation I had was the group bicycle ride that goes off on Sunday mornings from Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop).  Everything else I could schedule based on my own whims or needs.  The below is what I drew up; I’ll explain each of the days and the rationale for them below the table.

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Notes: B = bike, IL = inline, SB = slideboard

Tuesday and Saturday morning inline: Sprint Workouts
As you can see the two sprint workouts on Tuesday and Saturday (the highest quality) come after a full day off so I’d be the most rested; this is crucial for not only high quality work but due to the technical demands of skating, especially speed work.  You simply can’t do good speed work tired.   These workouts consisted of 10-20 minutes of easy skating (1-2 laps of my course) as both an easy warm-up as well as some basic endurance maintenance.

After that I would do 5 rolling starts up a slight incline, the first two were fairly sub-maximal still warming up and I was going all out, running off the line, by the third.  Then I’d do 5 standing starts up the same hill.  Initially I took these out to about 40 meters but I stretched this out over the 6-week block to a full 80 meters which allowed me to get into full on sprint skating (and have time to slow down before the intersection so as not to get run over). This was just pure power/acceleration work with each repeat lasting less than 10 seconds.  I typically took 2-3 minutes rest between starts.

After that I did 5 intervals working on top speed.  These started as 20 second sprints from a rolling start with an all out initial acceleration trying to build them all the way through.  I increased the duration of these to 35 seconds by the end of it.  I took a full 5 minutes between these repeats.  This was a long workout (90 minutes minimum) although most of it was just standing around in the heat looking like a doofus.

Tuesday and Saturday Bike:Tempo Workouts
Tuesday and Saturday evenings were tempo workouts since I wanted to keep building my FTP from the bottom as well.  Low tempo had a goal of 90 minutes at an average heart rate of 150 and I included some low cadence (80 RPMs or lower) work in there since that shifts more of the stress to the muscles away from the cardiovascular system.

High tempo was done at 160 average heart rate and was a progression of 2X20 minutes, 2X25 minutes and then 2X30 minutes (with 10 minutes between sets) and then I’d bump the wattage and start over (I didn’t actually stick to this exactly since I progressed faster than I expected to).  Again, I did some low cadence work in there which is awfully grindy and made my knees ache a bit.

Wednesday Bike: Aerobic Maintenance w/Sprint
The Wednesday bike ride was just easy aerobic, heart rate of 135 beats per minute with a goal of 60-90 minutes (it was usually 60 minutes).  It also provided a very easy day after Tuesay.  The ‘sprint’ work here was purely leg speed work.  After 20 minutes of riding I would do 15 seconds of high cadence work every 5 minutes for 6 total repeats. I’d keep the same wattage and just focus on cadence.

This is pretty much just basic neuromuscular training, teach muscles to turn on and off rapidly, that sort of thing; we had done them in SLC to help with starts.  I did these a few different ways, starting from a dead stop, or shifting gears as I spun out, or simply trying to get my leg speed up as high as I could. I think my best was 182 RPM’s. This is a type of training you make pretty rapid gains in and then that’s it and I only ended up doing this for the first 4 of the 6 weeks.

Thursday Slideboard: Aerobic Maintenance
The Thursday slideboard workout was just aerobic maintenance.  As I’ve noted, I can slideboard with a heart rate in the mid to high 130′s and although it’s boring, it gave my legs a much needed break from Tuesday and Wednesday and left me fresh for the HARD bike workout on Thursday night.

So I’d warm-up on the bike for 10 minutes, put in an hour (as something like 10X6′/30″ rest or 12X5′/30″ rest) on the slideboard and then spin for 10 more minutes.  Again, this was just aerobic maintenance and to keep my low back adapted to the skating position for longer durations.

Thursday Bike Ride: Interval
Thursday’s workout was arguably the most important one for what I was really trying to improve.  I decided to spend most of the first 6 weeks focusing purely on topmost end power with what amounts to strength training on the bike.  After a thorough warm-up, I performed 10-15X6-10″ (that’s 6-10 seconds) all out against high wattage and I did that on 2 minutes (so every 2 minutes I’d go again).  This was anywhere from 12-20 total revolutions depending on how long I went and how well I kept my cadence up.

The idea was that by first driving up my very top most power outputs, I’d bring up other stuff (such as my 1 minute power) by extension.  In weeks 4-6 of the first block, I finished this day off with 3X30″ at my goal 1′ pace (470-480w up from my previous 1′ best of 400w) to start getting ready for the shift to glycolytic anaerobic work in the next 6 week blocks.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t do more of this work on the bike, keep in mind that my two skating sprint workouts had a lot of overlap with this workout physiologically speaking.   With three sprint workouts per week, I was already stretched pretty thin so I decided to only do one of these per week.

Sunday Bike: Group Ride
Finally was the Sunday group ride which lasted anywhere from 2-3 hours.  This got me a long bike ride in, got me in a pack and was a lot more variable than my other training.  It alternates from an easy start to some faster pieces (when the guys up front get rambunctious), you can sit in the pack, there are climbs, you get the idea.

This was also a way for me to get some pack experience, surrounded by other maniacs on metal machines at high speeds.  I’d force myself to sit close to someone’s wheel or ride on the shoulder with someone outside of me, or next to someone just to get some exposure to being in a pack at high speeds.

This type of riding offends my control freak sensibilities (especially when what is meant to be a ‘mellow’ ride turns into a dick swinging contest by the guys at the front) but is far closer to what happens in a race than most of my training since it contains all the different elements in one workout.

It also allowed me to keep some track of progress from the more isolated work since our courses were usually similar and the riders were more or less the same week to week.   And while I was usually pretty trashed by Sunday morning after the Saturday high tempo ride, this is what I’ll be dealing with in Chicago where I’ll have to skate the marathon on Sunday following two races the day before.  So I had to just suck it up.

And that was my weekly cycle for the 6 weeks.  And with the exception of one skipped Wednesday bike ride in week 4 (my legs were just too trashed), and one missed group ride in week 5 (we ended up on the freeway and I was just too tired to deal with it so I went home and spun on the trainer), I completed them all.

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And How Did it Go?

Overall, the cycle couldn’t have gone any better.  I made the progress I wanted to make and hit or surpassed all of my goals in terms of power outputs on the bike (I actually achieved them all by week 5).  I’m still off of my body composition goal but I also still have 7 more weeks.  As I finish this, I’m taking the unloading week I indicated up above.  My legs were feeling pretty beaten up and since I’d already hit all of my goals it made sense to unload before the next block starts.  I’m maintaining a bit of intensity but cutting my volume by about half on all workouts and am already feeling recovered and ready to go.

Beyond that, here are some observations on the individual components of what I was trying to improve:

I still suck at starts.  I felt like an absolute spasm on my skates the first few weeks of returning to starts.  I was always pretty awful at them on the ice but having been away from them for 14 months didn’t help.  It wasn’t until about week 3 that I started to feel comfortable on these at all.  My hip flexors also got very sore from doing them (hip flexor pulls are not unheard of in speed skating because of how you drive the knee through).

It was impossible for me to really track progress on these due to the short time period.  My Garmin won’t record speeds well over short distances and I found that I spent too much time worrying about the start/stop button than sprinting so I stopped trying.  I just tried to go all out and get some semblance of technical competency back.

The speed work on skates did improve although my speeds were all over the place.  I skated three different ‘parts’ of my road course; that along with highly variable wind conditions makes it difficult to compare my actual speeds (though I did see at least one 25mph top speed which makes me happy).

I will however note this: in Texas Road Rash 2011: Race Report Part 2 I mentioned that something was missing from my skating during the race (pressure) that I couldn’t really explain.  Well, I found it again.  The combination of skate work plus, I suspect, the low cadence stuff on the bike, got me developing pressure on my skates again rather than just spinning my legs at too high of a cadence.  I got back to loading up the skate as I dropped the hip in to get a solid push again.

The tempo workouts on the bike just sucked.  They are long and miserable and grindy and the time just ticks by so slowly.  But I finished the block doing a full hour (including 2X15 minute blocks at a low cadence) at a power output that I could only sustain for 10 minutes a few months ago (and could do for maybe 8 all out minutes in Salt Lake City at a much higher body weight).  So it was worth it: my sustainable aerobic level is even higher than it was.  This was the main place that I actually surpassed the goals I’d set for myself (I had readjusted them in week 3 when it was clear I would).

Then there was the bike interval workout.  I had my first indication that this was working in Week 1.  After punishing out 15X6″ on 2 minutes the night before I woke up that Friday sore as all hell.  I don’t mean “My legs are tired” sore.   This was sore as in “First week back squatting after months off” sore.  From a bike ride.  Where there’s no eccentric.

My quads, glutes, the glute/ham tie in…just trashed from this.   Not only does this prove that I can get sore from absolutely anything, it told me that some muscle fibers had definitely gone totally untrained to date.  I had no other explanation for this.

This would continue throughout the cycle and I got sore almost every week but I made continuous progress, adding nearly 100 watts to my best 6″ time.  Some of this just represents how poorly I was starting out: my top end is still pretty sucky but it sucks a lot less than it did.  This gives me hope that my 1′ power outputs will make the improvement I was hoping for as I move into that phase of training.

My initial 30″ repeats at my goal wattages tell me that I will hit my goal which is currently 480 watts (which would be up from 400 watts right before the Road Rash); this would also be better than my best wattage (at nearly 8kg heavier) in SLC.  It’s still nowhere close to where it needs to be or where I’d like it to be but I’m happy with the improvement for only 6 weeks of work.   Clearly in the long term this is something I need to put more focused work into.

Finally there was the group ride and this is where I got perhaps the most positive reinforcement that the change in training was working.  Because even at the end of week 1, I had found an entirely new gear.  In a group ride where I had gotten pummeled on the climbs and dropped when it got fast in previous weeks, all of a sudden I was hanging in and hanging on.  And this happened on the first Sunday following my first interval bike ride.

Suddenly, I wasn’t blowing up when I had to put some real pressure on the pedals, started staying with the group on the climbs (climbing better than I ever did in my 20′s) and even hung in when it got fast.  I was able to make some quick jumps (or even sustained efforts) to bridge gaps and saw some real improvements.   And I saw progress weekly until week 5 when my legs were just destroyed and we got split up (and didn’t have a female ride leader keeping the guys in front under control).  All of which told me I was on the right track.

And as I finish my recovery week, not only do my legs feel good but my heart rates are dropping for each workout.  I was in the 120′s on the slideboard after having spent the block in the 130′s and everything on the bike is a solid 5 beats lower at a given wattage (since I still do too much training indoors, I can compare workouts).

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Finishing Up

And as I finish my recovery week, not only do my legs feel good but my heart rates are dropping for each workout.  I was in the 120′s on the slideboard after having spent the block in the 130′s and everything on the bike is a solid 5 beats lower at a given wattage (since I still do too much training indoors, I can compare workouts).

So I’m recovering and adapting and plan to be ready for the next 6 week block of training to the race.  I’m even kind of excited about doing some more bike racing in the Driveway Series now that I have some sort of top end; I’m not afraid of getting blown out like I did at the Ronde Von Manda so many months ago.

And now I’m looking to the next 6 weeks of training where I’m going to try to keep building on this progress leading into Chicago.  I still haven’t worked out everything I’m going to do except for a handful of things.  More time on my skates, some racing in the Driveway series, the bike rides are still the big question mark for me.    You’ll hear about it in, oh, about 6 weeks I imagine.

Read Methods of Endurance Training: 2011 Season Part 13.

While I was ultimately happy with my performance, in that I skated to the best of my ability, it did identify a number of weaknesses in my skating in terms of that type of event.  I had been aware of some of them going in but nothing brings out strong and weak points like actual racing.

I had originally planned to take the week following the race as a recovery/transition week anyhow; I was so wrecked from the race that I wouldn’t have been able to train even if I’d wanted to.  And after my brief flirting with overtraining only weeks prior along with the effort of the race, I didn’t particularly want to.  So I sat around for 3 days and did no training and ate too much.  I had finished my first full macrocycle and wanted to be completely recharged going into the next one.

This was followed by 2 very easy bike rides on Thursday and Friday.  I dicked around on my skates Saturday morning checking some stuff out on my course (I’ll talk about this a bit more on Friday) and then did a group bike ride on Sunday. These were just to shake out the cobwebs again as I started the next macrocycle to my next major race.

That was the Chicago Inline Marathon where I intended to do the Tour of Chicago, a 3 race event across two days including a 10k pack race Saturday morning, a 2 mile individual time trial Saturday afternoon and the full marathon on Sunday morning with points given for placing in all three to determine the overall winner.  Not only would three races that weekend justify travelling but it would let me get the 10k out of my system that I’ve been wanting to do for years without having to go to Atlanta (that 10k interfered with a bike race I wanted to do in Austin Labor Day Weekend).  As it turned out, the Atlanta event had gotten cancelled this year anyhow so it all worked out.

If nothing else, having a week to sit around before starting my next block of training gave me a lot of time to analyze the Road Rash in more detail, my training to date, and what I perceived to be strengths and weaknesses, especially relative to the types of races I was now doing (note again that this was my first full marathon and I really had no frame of reference for it).  That was the first step in determining how to go about fixing them.

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Strengths, Weaknesses and Addressing Them

As I discussed in Texas Road Rash 2011: Race Report Part 2, I had identified 3 major weaknesses at the race, two of which I was fairly aware of going in.  They were:

1. Pack Skills
2. Acceleration/Starts
3. Top Speed
   

Given my lack of a top end, neither number 2 or 3 were a big shock.  I had done what little I could in the time I had had leading up to the Road Rash to fix them but it was clear that I needed a longer approach to fixing my top end problems.  As I mentioned, with basically 14 months of pretty much steady state aerobic work, my lack of a top end was no surprise.  And the Road Rash had pointed out that the elite marathon not only meant higher top speeds but a fundamentally different type of racing with more speed changes.

And in that I do all of my skating alone (and only recently started riding bikes in a group), my lack of pack skills was no big shock either.  We had done a bit of work in a pack on the ice but since the sport is really individual when it comes to racing, it was never a real priority.

Basically, over the past year plus, I had trained myself to do an individual time trial, a long bout at at high steady-state level with very little ability to go above that level.   The races I’d gone to in 2010, half-marathons lasting about 40 minutes, allowed me to get away with it.  And given that that’s what metric long-track ice speedskating is it’s not shock that my training was still geared towards that.

But clearly that wasn’t going to get it done at the marathon level surrounded by pros and elites.  Between higher top speeds, constant accelerations and the need to at least get off the line to stay with the fast pack (the only real reason starts are relevant at this distance), I needed to make some major changes to my training to shore up my weak points.

So already the targets of my training were starting to fall into place.  Amusingly, about this time, I had picked up a copy of Eddie B’s old cycling book Bicycle Road Racing: Complete Program for Training and Competition.  While a bit cookie cutter in terms of the actual training program, one thing that stood out was his comment on weak points where he stated:

First get clear in your mind exactly what is wrong.  If you are having trouble in the hills, it means you have a power problem.  If you try to win primes or the finishing sprint and are not really in contention, you have a speed problem.  If during the last 10km of a road race you feel worse and worse, you have an endurance problem.

So simple, so to the point.  Since my 20′s I’ve always sucked at climbing (on the bike), I get dropped like nobody’s business.  As noted above, clearly I had a top speed issue and my sprint was more or less non-existent. Endurance, on the other hand, was no problem; I had endurance coming out of my ass (so to speak).  What I needed was speed.

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The Need for Speed

Continuing to beat this dead horse, in looking at my own race results versus the top finishers, I found it interesting that Joey Mantia, who was 5 minutes ahead of the pack (holding a blistering 22.7 mph by himself) holds world records ranging from the 300m (a track event) on up to far longer events.  For example, here’s video of of him inline skating at 39mph.  Now, part of this is probably his just being an amazing skater across the board but clearly there is something to the idea that a higher top speed can ‘trickle’ down to longer distances (assuming the proper endurance training is done).

For a guy who can top out at near 40mph, 23 mph is nothing.  It’s the whole speed reserve concept; up to a point at least, a guy with a higher top speed can race at any submaximal speed with less effort (again assuming the endurance work is done).  The same could be said for Jason Stelley and Harry Vogel both of whom are monsters both indoors and on the ice (Harry skated one of the fastest flying 400m laps on the ice ever) with massive top speeds and acceleration abilities (indoor also gives them mad pack skills).

That observation along with my own analysis of my racing told me that, at least for some period of time, I needed to train much more like a sprinter than anything else.  As I noted in the last part, my endurance was more than fine.   I needed speed and the logical approach to that was speed training.

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The Components of Speed

When you’re talking about pure unadulterated speed, there are, fundamentally, two major components: neuromuscular skill and sheer power output.  By neuromuscular skill I mean the ability to perform technically well in a way that allows you to go fast.  Things like technique, the ability to produce force rapidly, the ability to switch from contraction to relaxation, overall leg speed, that kind of thing is all part of the neural aspects of going fast.  And make no mistake it is a skill that has to be learned.

The other part of it is simply sheer power output.  In this vein, my power outputs on the bike were equally supportive of my analysis of my own strengths and weaknesses.  My FTP (functional threshold power, discussed in Predictors of Endurance Training Performance) and VO2 max power outputs were in the proper relationship, both giving me a solid Category 3 rating.  In contrast, my 5 seconds and 1 minute power outputs were in the ‘untrained’ category (this is based on the chart in Coggan and Allen’s book Training and Racing with a Power Meter 2nd Edition).  Which isn’t a huge shock given that I hadn’t trained them.

So my approach to fixing the problem was two fold: first off I wanted to improve my top end power outputs on the bike.  Since I still had some bike races planned, this could only help.  Second I needed to work on the skill aspect of going fast on skates.  Essentially sprint training.

Targeting the first was just about doing the work on the bike to improve my top end.  In a very real sense that was the ‘easy’ part at least in terms of planning.  The second was less obvious.  Now, in one sense I know how to train for sprinting, that’s most of what we did on the ice and, to a first approximation, all I really needed to do was apply what we had done in Salt Lake City.

But there’s a problem: corners.  On the ice, a great deal of speed and acceleration comes from the corners.  You can use them to roll into speed work and gain speed and even a 200m acceleration is at least half corner.  And that just doesn’t apply to outdoor inline where it’s straight line acceleration and top speed.  So while I could certainly apply some concepts from the ice, I needed some input into straight line speed.

And that’s when I got in touch with an expert.  My friend Derek Hansen, a sprint/S&C coach in Canada worked closely with Charlie Francis, sprint coach extraordinaire; in him I had an excellent resource to see about applying some of Charlie’s concepts to skating.  That Derek had worked with the Canadian speed skating team helped; it wasn’t as if he was coming to this with no background.

He helped me with some training ideas to take what Charlie had done on the track and apply it to my skating.  The dicking around I had done during my first skate back after the Road Rash had actually been figuring out some distances and times for some different components of the sprint training I planned to do.

So now I had all the pieces: I wanted to improve my top end power outputs on the bike, work on the skill component of going fast on skates, hopefully shore up some of my pack weaknesses.  Continuing to improve my functional threshold, of course, was always important but only if I could do it while fixing my top end issues.

And of course I didn’t want to sacrifice any of my endurance but that’s relatively easy to maintain, especially given my previous 14 months of training.  And, again, I had to figure out how to do all of this without blowing myself up again.  I actually set out some very specific goals (four related to power output, one related to body composition) that I wanted to achieve before Chicago and then set out putting together the program that I hoped would get me there.

And that’s what I’ll describe in detail on Friday.

Read Methods of Endurance Training: 2011 Season Part 12

Today I’ll actually get to the real part of the story, as I mentioned in The Bearing Story: Part 1 only Caleb and I were at summer training consistently for the most part.  Other skaters came and went but they were usually so much further behind he and I that, for all practical purposes, he and I skated together.

And for the first 3 years or so of skating endless lap on/lap off with him, Caleb just handed me my butt.  Either he’d drop me entirely or I’d just absolutely kill myself to stay with him (all while he seemed to be barely working).  In the first two years this made sense, my corners were awful and since that’s where you get most of your acceleration and speed on the ice, it made sense that he’d drop me on our track.

But about year three, my corners were at least starting to come together.  But he was still just murdering me in workouts.  At slower speeds I could stay with him if I just gave it my all; with anything faster, he’d just keep dropping me.  It was made all the more irritating since I had come from an inline background (he came from downhill skiing, but that meant he knew how to lean into corners); I was supposed to be the one who was good at this.  And I was getting killed.

At the time, I think we were skating something like a minute and five seconds or a minute ten for the lap with a full circle.  Anything faster and I’d get dropped and he could pop off sub minute laps without effort. As I mentioned, even if i stayed with him, it’d take everything I had.  Like I said, really frustrating.

Going into year four, things got strange with our group (well, stranger).  Caleb had moved up north and did a good bit of his inline training on his own because the drive down into the valley was so long.  So realistically I was skating all of my inline workouts by myself (at best the other skaters in our group might make 10 total minutes while I’d be up at an hour).

My corners were at least passable at this point (this was the first year that winds wouldn’t stop me in my tracks) and certainly better on my inlines, where I felt more comfortable, than on the ice.  And my lap times were still stagnant.  No matter what I did I was still doing a minute 5 or a minute ten on the work laps and it just wouldn’t budge.  And we couldn’t figure out why.

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Of Inline Skate Bearings

Inline skates, like quad style roller skates and even skateboards, use small bearings, with two going into each wheel (with a spacer in between).  While there was a brief design with a single bearing in the center of the wheel back in the 1990′s it never caught on.  To break up the dense text, here’s a picture of a standard skate bearing.

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Each bearing has two dust shields on it (you pop them off by getting that little C-ring thing out which tends to be a huge pain in the ass involving a safety pin and multiple stab wounds to your fingers) which gives you access to the bearings.  There are actually unshielded bearings but they are cheap in every sense of the word: they don’t cost very much but they don’t turn for crap.

Now, in that skating isn’t really a heavy equipment sport (certainly not compared to something like road cycling where you can drop as much money as you care to on gear), bearings were always a place where a bit of silliness went on.  There wasn’t much to apply to boots or frames (there was minor silliness) and wheels only got nuts in the last few years but that left bearings as the place where the real stupidity took place.

Now, Bearings are rated by something called the ABEC (Annular Bearing Engineering Committee) and rankings exists from ABEC 1 to ABEC 9 (with no even numbers, it’s ABEC 1,3,5,7,9).  It’s really important to realize that bearing ratings primarily exist to define tolerances for high-speed machinery.  Case in point, ABEC 9 bearings are rated up to something stupid like 10,000 revolutions per minute.  Just insane levels of tolerances for machines spinning at roughly a zillion (give or take a million) times faster than they would EVER spin on skates.  EVER.

But that didn’t stop people from pushing high-end bearings for skating performance.  Back in the day, you had to spend a pretty penny to get ABEC 9 bearings, now they are reasonably inexpensive and most recreational skates come with at least ABEC3 (rec skates used to come with unshielded bearings and you had to pay extra for even ABEC 1).

I can still remember when ceramic bearings (they take a small block of ceramic material and compress it) came out for bikes.  They were just some stupid price although you can get them cheaper now.  Basically you’re paying for higher tolerances on the machining along with supposedly less friction.

For the most part, in my opinion, it makes little difference for at least two reasons.  As noted, the highest end bearings are rated for spin speeds that no human will ever achieve and there are other factors of far more importance to performance than a bearing rated to spin that much faster than you’ll ever go.  Small differences in friction matters at 10,000 RPMs.  Not so much at 20-22mph on skates.

Another issue is that these bearings are made for linear loading (that is to spin along their rotational axis) and skating actually puts a weird angular loading on them because of how you push; that’s on top of the bearing on ‘top’ of the wheel being subjected to different loading than the bearing on the ‘bottom’.  I can’t be bothered to try to explain this any further because I’ll do a terrible job anyhow.  Just please take my word for it: the nature of the skating push means that the bearings can’t be run at optimal speeds anyhow because they are being loaded in a way that they simply aren’t designed for.

Which doesn’t mean that bearings don’t matter, just not in terms of whether you’re running ABEC 3 or 9 or Bones or ceramics.   You’re paying for miniscule differences in machining along with miniscule differences in frictional resistance.  Both factors that are far more overwhelmed by other factors.  Such as when your bearings get dirty.

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Servicing Bearings

Know how I mentioned a dust shield on bearings?  It’s there because crap gets into the bearings.  This is especially true for skating where you’re outdoors and all manners of dirt and dust and other crapola can get into the bearing assembly and gum things up.  Rain/water is deadly, not only does it remove the oil from the bearing, but they will rust if you don’t dry and oil them shortly after you skate.

For this reason, skaters will clean or service their bearings.  Or, if they have tons of money or sponsorship, just get new ones sent out.  I’d note that even new bearings are typically cleaned/serviced since the manufacturers tend to use a heavier oil than you’d want for most skating applications.  I imagine this is a heat issue, a bearing spinning at 10,000 RPMs generates a ton of heat and you need heavy oil.  For skating….

In any case, servicing bearings means popping the C-ring off and prying up the dust shield (again, a huge pain in the ass).  Then you use some type of solvent to clean the gunk (either original oil or dirt and stuff) out of the bearing; if you’re an eco-type you use one of the natural solvents, if you don’t care you use something like carboreutor cleaner.

Then you oil them with the oil of your choice (and there’s lots of different kinds available).  Some people replace the dust shield and C-ring; for inline skates you can actually just face the open part of the bearing into the wheel.  Very little is getting in there and this saves you the headache of dealing with the C-rings over and over again.

As you can probably imagine, I never paid more than basic attention to my bearings.  I remember skating in my 20′s and a teammate telling me that the Muse brothers (two of the top skaters of the time) would service their bearings until they would spin freely for a minute.  If they couldn’t get that, they’d reclean/oil them.  I always thought it was a bit silly.

But can you see what this is all sort of leading up to?

WTF is Up with Those Bearings?

So back to the story, we’re in SLC, I’ve spent 4 years mired in this annoyingly slow lap time on our skating track and we just can’t figure out why.  Until one day, for whatever reason, Rex picked up one of my inline skate wheels and spun the wheels.  Let me note again that these are the same skates I had raced on in my 20′s.

The wheels made some horrible noises and ground quickly to a halt.  He asked me gently when the last time I had serviced the bearings was.  I told him that not only could I not remember but, realistically, it was probably around 1995 or so.  Keep in mind that this was like 2010.  So 15 years give or take.  With no guarantee that they had been serviced well back then.

To put it mildly, he was a bit taken aback.  He described his specific cleaning method to me (developed over 3 decades of trying different stuff) with instructions to get it taken care of before the next session.   I dutifully did this and showed up to the next inline session not really knowing what to expect.

We went through the normal routine and then finally moved to lap on/lap off.  Neither of us knew what to expect so I just launched on my first lap.  As I recall, there was a distinct improvement, my lap times dropped quickly to the mid to high 50 second range (I’m thinking 56-57 seconds).  So damn near 10 seconds over 200-300 meters from just a basic cleaning.  Clearly the bearings had been holding me back.

But, for whatever reason of his own, he wasn’t satisfied.  At our next workout, he presented me with a brand new set of bearings, serviced by his very own hand with instructions to mount them for the next workout.  Which, once again, I dutifully did.

Again we went through the normal workout and then it was time for lap on/lap off once again.  He said he was expecting maybe a 50-51 second lap or so.  Whether he was guessing or what I don’t know.  So I launch off on my first lap, up the first straight, around the corner, back down the second straight. I’d mention that our lot wasn’t perfectly flat and there was a slight downhill into the full circle.

I hit that thing and, well…I nearly shit my pants.  As Rex describes it, there was a high pucker factor.  It took all I had to even hold the corner and when I finished up the lap he called out something absurd like a 46-47 second lap. With the full circle.  So with nothing more than a new set of super cleaned and serviced bearings, my lap times dropped 20 seconds off of a minute five/minute ten lap which is something stupid like a 28-30% improvement.  I can’t do the math on the actual speed increase but it had to have been multiple miles per hour.

I’d note before finishing up that the next time Caleb joined us at inline practice, it was a bit of a shock for him when we went to the main set of the workout.  He had been pretty used to just piddling along with me for slow laps; instead we spent the better part of an hour hammering one another with repeat 46-47 second laps.  But that’s a different story.

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Summing Up

Yeah, I know it was a lot of background for not much of a story. But it let me update the site twice; I told you it was mainly space filler. So what’s the point of all this. Like I said, the main point is that I am often an idiot who gets in his own way. That’s not really news.

I think the real point I’m trying to make is that there are times where equipment not only matters but can make a pretty considerable difference. This was obviously one of them. Certainly most situations won’t be quite that extreme, the above is what happens when you correct a serious problem (I’d mention that part of the impetus for writing this up was a post to the power training group about a guy who cleaned his bottom bracket bearings and got a 20 watt bump on his power outputs).

To get a further improvement from equipment would mean investing a lot more time, energy and/or money and the return would be far far smaller. I still don’t try to achieve the 1 minute free spin that the Muse’s used to use though I am more attentive to bearing maintenance and function. If I can get all my wheels spinning for 45 seconds I’m happy. If one of them grinds to a halt after 10 seconds, I’ll switch out bearings until I get them spinning.

And that’s the bearing story.

I mentioned this issue/story very obliquely in Methods of Endurance Training: 2011 Season Part 9 when I was talking about equipment; I just didn’t have the time nor space to discuss it there.  More accurately this is a story that goes with the No Regrets Series since that’s when it happened.  No matter, space filler is space filler and it’s all just part of the timeline.

Now as I was blathering about in Methods of Endurance Training: 2011 Season Part 9, I’ve never been a huge equipment guy (though I love training toys; go figure).  Fed up with people who try to buy performance (usually in lieu of training or what have you), I sort of ended up at the other extreme and often neglect my equipment.  I mentioned in that piece that my skates would explode at least once or twice a year on the ice because I wouldn’t tighten the bolts.

And while I still feel that, for the most part, equipment is secondary to other things relevant to performance, there are places where it matters.  One of those places is when your equipment is just horrible.  In general, cheap stuff is just cheap; it doesn’t work well, falls apart, whatever.  And it will hold you back if it sucks too hard.  But once you surpass some price threshold, rarely does throwing more money at the problem generate massive improvement benefits.  Sure, it matters for the top 1%.  If you’re reading this, you’re not one of them.

But there is another place where equipment, even ‘proper’ equipment can be limiting and that’s when you don’t keep it in good (or at least passable) working order.  This story is an example of that second situation.

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The Background: Summer Inline

As I discussed somewhat in the No Regrets Series ice speed skating is a bit odd as a sport in that a large amount of the training is not done on the ice.  This was originally a holdover from the realities of winter sports (you can’t skate on a frozen pond if the pond isn’t frozen or ski when there isn’t snow) and speed skaters were often faced with up to 6 months where they had to find ways to train without having access to ice.

My coach used to tell of his own career where he’d spend 6 months off-ice, maybe 6 weeks skating short-track, 6 weeks on the long-track, another 6 weeks short-track and that was it. When you have to wait for lakes and such to freeze, that’s what you have to deal with unless you could afford to go to Europe to train.

Even outdoor ovals have to deal with weather to some degree, it’s to expensive to try to freeze water when it’s warm out so even with the ovals in the US (Lake Placid, Butte, maybe one more) speed skating was still limited to a lot of off-ice summer training.

Even now, with the advent of indoor ovals (the Salt Lake City oval is open about 10 months out of the year), the reality is that most speed skaters still don’t stay on the ice year round.  My coach had told me that the Canadians had tried it when they first built Calgary but everyone was burnt by October. Skating around on an ice circle just does that to you.

So the sport still revolves around some extended period of summer dryland training before you move to the ice.  Programs vary but almost all of them revolve around some combination of bike riding, weight training, skate specific dryland ‘imitations’ (something I’ll write about in more detail eventually) and other stuff.

That other stuff often but not always includes inline skating.  When inlines first came around, back in the early 80′s (the fad didn’t hit until the 90′s and designs actually existed in the 1920′s or so) there were seen as quite the novel thing for ice speed skaters, who finally had a way to practice skating during the summer time.  Certainly there were some differences that had to be recognized (especially given how heavy early inline skates were) but they offered another far more specific way to train for ice speed skating.

My coach used inline skating extensively as part of our training, he’d told me that he got most of his technical improvements during the summer time and inline was a big part of that. Generally twice per week during our summer training (which usually ran 20 weeks) we’d meet at the parking lot for inline training.   This included warmups, turn cable (which got gruelling in the heat, especially by the time he was pushing me the length of the parking lot for about 2+ minutes of continuous turning) a ton of technical drills and then conditioning.  We also set up a track.

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The Inline Track: AKA The Circle of Hell

Among the other fun things we did in the parking lot, we also skated an inline track that we’d set up.  We used skateboard wheels as blocks (we’d use a rope to ensure that the circles were the same diameter although we finally got smart and spray painted markers to save time) and set up a standard corner at one end and the full circle at the end.

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We never did actually measure the thing but it was probably 200-300 meters total one time around.  With this set up we could practice everything we needed to do on the ice including corners, straightaways, corner entries and exits.   We’d do circle drills around the full circle (coach stood in the middle so he could see/yell at us) and even did circles for time which was murderous.  We also did right hand circles to help avoid some of the back problems that tend to plague skaters.  It was on a right hand circle that I tripped myself and cracked my rib the one season.

Of course, we could also skate full laps and while we very occasionally did extended sets, our typical workout was what is called lap on/lap off.  Basically skate a lap (at whatever pace/heart rate/effort Rex wanted), then cruise a lap.  And we’d do this for extended periods, at one point I was doing a straight hour which amounted to about 25-30 laps or so.  It wasn’t really hard, it was mainly just boring.

With few exceptions we did this as a full circle lap.  So we’d start at the top where I indicated start/finish going towards the half circle. You start by accelerating  the straightaway then skate a standard corner, exit down the straight, hit the full circle and go all the way around it (so you get a circle and a half), exit to the straightaway and then stand up.  Then you coast up around the corner, back down and around the second corner and then start your next lap (you don’t get to do the full circle on the rest lap).

Rex would shout lap times to give us an idea of where we were (we usually had some goal time for each lap) and if there was more than one of us skating, we’d alternate leads (usually it was just Caleb and I consistently).

And that’s where I’m going to cut it today; yes, all of the above was basically background for the actual story which I’ll tell on Friday (this is all part of my current approach to extending content by making everything more than one part).

Read The Bearing Story: Part 2.