With winter in full effect, everyone has to be creative when it comes to training. The Iron Fit Endurance athletes and I have been riding at The Hub when we can. When The Hub is booked with other people training, we head to our “Iron Fit Warehouse” where we suffer together on the bike!
A few athletes have done it right this winter, John Burgess spends the winters training in Florida and Frank Fiorello, has spent quite a bit of time training and racing in the warmth of Florida and other warm areas too. Jim Nost
rom is now LIVING down in Florida and is spending time training for a 170 mile cycling event across the state! He is pictured here wearing SHORTS before a local 5K down in Florida. Lucky guy...
I headed down to Puerto Rico with a few girls to do some warm open water swimming and to do a little reconnaissance for a 2016 Iron Fit Endurance training camp! I am really excited about the camp for 2016 and am in the process of planning it. More details to come!
Recently, I had the pleasure to do a talk about “Training with Power 101” at The Hub for the Wildwood Warriors. I spoke about the basics of training with power and what to do if you do decide to invest in a power meter (an invaluable investment in your training and racing). I have been training with power since 2004, when power meters were “less known”. As I told the Wildwood Warriors, it was an eye-opening experience for me! I worked with my coach, who was a master at training with power and I got to see first-hand how beneficial it was to train with a power meter. 11 years later and I still wouldn't train any other way. Why is it so beneficial to your training, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you:
- INSTANT FEEDBACK! With a power meter you know how you are performing instantly as opposed to heart rate, which lags. For example, say you have a VO2 workout of 5x4 minutes. With a power meter you know what to hold for those intervals and you know instantly if you are hitting the wattage range or not. With Heart Rate, it will take some time to get into the heart rate range you need to. By the time you reach the VO2 Heart rate, you are already well into the interval. With heart rate, it’s just not as clear whether you are working in the range that you should be. With power you know exactly where you should be.
- CLEARLY SEE YOUR RESULTS AND IMPROVEMENTS! With a power meter you know exactly what you are doing in each and every workout, which makes it clear when you are improving! For example, say you do the classis “2x20 at threshold” workout each week. With a power meter you have specific ranges that you need to hit. But one day you go out and you find that you exceeded that range! Usually you hold in the range of 210-220 watts on your 2x20’s, but now you find 220-230 watts to be the numbers that you are hitting. You are clearly seeing improvements in your workouts and your threshold! With heart rate, you cannot see improvements like this. Now, with your power meter, you have a new goal for the next time you are doing the workout and you can clearly see the improvements in your training!
- YOU KNOW WHEN YOU NEED TO RECOVER! Let’s say you head out to do the “2x20 workout”. You are pushing at the very same “perceived exertion” that you usually do. You are doing everything you can to hit your threshold range of 210-220, but you find that you can’t even break 200 today! This is a CLEAR sign that you need to STOP the workout, spin easily home and REST. Your body needs to recover!
- RACING BECOMES SIMPLE! When I was racing pro I used to say that racing with a power meter was “like cheating”! After figuring out what wattage range I could ride in Ironman and still run off the bike (or any distance triathlon, for that matter) I would train at this wattage. Come race day, I felt confident that I could hold that wattage range, and if I did everything right nutritionally, come off the bike and run my best! How great is that? There is no guess work!
- POWER KEEPS YOUR WITS ABOUT YOU! When racing any distance race, half and full Ironman especially, what is one of the biggest mistakes that athletes make? GOING TOO HARD ON THE BIKE AND KILLING YOURSELF FOR THE RUN! With a power meter you know exactly the range to ride at and you know what wattage you should not exceed, which prevents you from “burning matches” for the run! Again, there is no guessing!!
I can go on and on about training power and its benefits. The main thing to remember if you do indeed invest in a power meter is the fact that power will mean nothing to you if you don’t do at least one of two things: educate yourself by investing in a great book on training with power such as the one pictured here, “Training & Racing with a Power Meter, 2nd Ed. Book by Hunter Allen & Andrew Coggan, Ph.D.”, OR work with someone who knows power and REALLY knows how to train with power properly. If you do, you will have that “eye-opening” experience that I did back in 2004, and I guarantee you will never go back!
Stay Warm and Happy Training!
Dee