Peter Vu's Ironman Blog - Vineman 7/31/10

 From Triathlete Europe's website:

It’s late in the race, your form is starting to fall apart and there’s no spring left in your stride. Your legs are battered and depleted, and you are struggling just to put one foot in front of the other as you accept the fact that your stride will continue to disintegrate all the way to the finish line. It’s an ugly end to a period of preparation that had you feeling like you were firing on all cylinders heading into your goal race.

This collapse comes as a bit of a surprise. You’ve been feeling strong during long runs and your workouts have gone so well that you can roll out of bed and run race pace all the way to the office. You covered all your bases in training—or thought you did, anyway. What went wrong?
While you made the efforts to hone your speed, improve your efficiency and nail down your nutrition in the weeks leading up to race day, there’s a good chance you never turned on the power switch at any point of your last training cycle. While a lot of triathletes will log months of mega-mileage and run workouts until the world stops turning, none of it will matter if you don’t have the strength in your stride to prevent your legs from fading into failure before you reach the finish line on race day.

Here are three simple drills recommended by a few top athletes and coaches that will help improve your stride power and prevent your form from falling apart next season.

Hill Training:

These aren’t hill repeats—this is running-specific strength work. Think of it as weightlifting without the weights. A set of short hill sprints on a steep grade—six to 10 maximum-intensity efforts of 10 seconds on a roughly 8-percent incline—forces you to focus on form, and also strengthens your stabilizers and gets your glutes firing much more effectively than squatting a barbell ever will.

“All of your fast-twitch fibers get recruited during the short sprints,” says Dennis Barker, head coach of Team USA Minnesota elite running group. “It helps your overall leg strength and improves your running economy.”

Recovery is key here. Even though the sprints are short, the recovery between them shouldn’t be. Take your time between the efforts; one to two minutes is ideal.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a coach today who doesn’t employ some variation of this workout in his training programs. I’ve used short hill sprints with my own athletes as an alternative means of working on power and mechanics early in the training cycle rather than having them hit the weight room or perform plyometrics. The results speak for themselves: Form doesn’t fade as quickly, finishing speed increases, overall lower-leg strength is improved and perhaps most importantly, instances of injury decrease.

Read about the other two drills here.