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

Training is hitting hard now. We're out of recovery mode and preparing for the full Ironman!!! On Saturday, the team did a 3 hour bike ride (Latigo + PCH). Today, I did a 9 mile run followed by an almost 2-mile swim. Trying to work out the kinks in my swim form:

• Glide and extension to pull
• Side to side pelvic turns
• Bringing my non-extending hand to skim the top of the water upon return instead of using my full arm

Those are only three things to work on, but it takes a lot of practice just to get it right. I really do not know if 2 months will be enough, but I hope to at least get incrementally better. Currently, I'm quite exhausted when I finish my swim. Advanced swimmers, on the other hand, are so efficient in the water that they don't expend that much energy. Work, work, work! They say that once you get to the point where you've mastered the stroke, you don't lose it. I'm really aiming for that right now, but I know that it won't come easy.

Anyhow, I thought I would share some simple phrases that I have really rung true throughout all my training:

• To go fast, you have to go slow first. Learn the form slowly, or you will waste energy trying to go fast. Go slow on the first part of the run, so that you will have energy later.
• No one can do this race for you, you have to do it. Your coaches can't race for you. To get there, you have to want it. Really want it. Badly. You have to hold yourself accountable and train responsibly. It's the same with anything hard (and potentially worthwhile) in life.
• You are your biggest enemy. The race is not you against the other competitors. It's you against yourself. How will you react when adversity hits you? How will you deal with the inevitable pain? How will you find the will to move forward when it's unbearably hot and you're tired and sore? At those moments, you just have to dig deep, believe in yourself and deal with it. Get it done!

Training ramps up this week! Plus, next weekend - wow. Sat: 5 hour bike ride Sun: 15 mile run followed by a 1.5 mile swim.

If you ever feel the need to complain about anything in life, please watch this. He's a huge inspiration to me, and I was stunned when I saw him swimming in my same lane a week ago.

Kyle Garlett, Novartis - March 2010 from Kyle Garlett on Vimeo.

We tried this new swimming drill tonight at the coaches' swim session. I like to call it "that drill".

Get a spare bicycle tube and cut a quarter of it off. Tie that quarter into a circle. Put it around your ankles and then try to swim 4 x 100 with 20 seconds rest. Make sure a lifeguard is around.

Thanks coaches!

From the Article: "What Makes Chrissie Wellington So Good?"

Flash back to the summer of 2008—the 2007 Ford Ironman World Champion, Chris McCormack, is having a knock-down, drag-out, one-on-one battle with Eneko Llanos of Spain in Frankfurt, Germany, at Ironman Europe. During the week leading into the race, McCormack and Wellington had become friends. “We spent some time talking and she’s such a positive person,” remembers McCormack. The run course in Frankfurt loops around and at one point the men ran past the lead women. “When I ran by Chrissie,” McCormack continues, “she started running with me and cheering ‘Way to go Chris, you are running GREAT! Who’s in second?’ I could barely breathe and I yelled back, ‘Llanos… he’s right behind me.’ So now she’s cheering for both of us and continuing to stay with both Eneko and me. Everyone knew Chrissie was a special talent, but after she ran with us for the better part of the next mile, I realized just how special.”

How special? She won the first Ironman she attempted—Ironman Korea in 2007—and she has yet to lose any Ironman-distance event. That’s three times in a row in Kona, two times in Australia and two times in Germany. In Kona this past October, she broke Paula Newby-Fraser’s 17-year-old course record and went 8:54:02. At the Quelle Challenge in Roth, Germany, she took nearly 14 minutes off the existing course record and went 8:31:59, the fastest time ever for a woman at an Ironman-distance race.

Enjoy these pics from Avia Wildflower Half-Ironman 5/1/2010. One word to sum it up: mindblowing. Vineman, next stop.

 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.

Check out this trailer for "Chasing Legends" courtesy of Coach Paul: