5 Days out from Surgery: All Signs Point to "Yes"

It's now been five days since I got my IT band sliced, and so far my reaction is: I had knee surgery?  Really?  I was able to walk without crutches or a cane as soon as I got home from the operation, and was even able to climb up and down stairs after a fashion.  I figured the pain would set in once the local anesthetic wore off, but really, it never did.  The most challenging thing to deal with in my recovery has been the itching caused by the high-power narcotics I was on for the first three days.

But today?  Well, I haven't even had Advil in a couple of days.  I'm limping a bit, and there's some pinching on the outside of my knee, but I suspect that both of these problems are primarily due to the stitches, which I'll have removed on Friday.  After that, I'll be able to swim, and perhaps even enjoy some light spinning on the bike.  No running for a few weeks yet, but I'll be hitting the deep-water running to the extent I can.

In general, I agree with the instinct to make surgery the last option.  But at the moment, if I'm honest, my main question is why I didn't have this done months ago.  I'm so enthusiastic about my progress that I'm even spending my days arguing with myself about whether I need a new bike.  Any avid cyclist knows what the answer to that question is.

Way to Make Race Weight 357: Cut A Piece Out Of Your Knee

In about twelve hours, I'll be heading into knee surgery for the lamest of all reasons: to fix an illiotibial ("IT") band injury.  Last May, June, and early July, I basically buried myself with ultracycling.  Every other weekend for two months, I had a ride that was at least twelve hours long, with the longest approaching 18 hours.  During the week I'd ride my trainer twice, run intervals, lift, do yoga, and swim.   To exactly no one's surprised, this eventually caught up with me, although it happened in a surprising way.  During a 5-mile brick run (that's a run immediately after a bike ride), I felt a bolt of pain on the outside of my right knee, like I'd tweaked something.  I hopped a bit and tried walking it off, but I found I basically couldn't put weight on my leg.  It was bad enough that I hopped to a cab in the area and hitched a ride home.

I'd heard people complain about IT band injuries before -- they're quite common among runners and cyclists.  Essentially, the IT band runs from the outside of the hip, along the outside of the femur, around the outside of the knee, and connects to the tibia just below the knee.  IT band friction syndrome arises -- at least according to most physicians -- when the IT band rubs along a bony point on the outside of the knee, becoming inflamed.  Because it's an overuse injury, I assumed it would come on slowly and be somewhat easy to remedy with rest, icing, and foam rolling, but neither was true.  When it came on, it felt like I may as well have sprained my knee: running was not remotely an option.  I did everything humanly possible to treat it, from getting massages 4x/week, to icing, stretching, and using a foam roller until I couldn't stand it any more, and then some more beyond that.  I was lucky enough to be able to finish Ironman Mont Tremblant four weeks after the injury, but I could only run for about the first three miles.  After that, my fall was a series of false starts; I just haven't been able to shake the injury, as much as I've tried.

From what I've learned, if this injury doesn't go away quickly, it can turn into a life partner.  There are many stories out there about runners who give up the sport entirely for years, only to have the injury flare up again a couple of miles into their first easy jog.  I could have kept up with the anti-inflammatories, icing, rolling, and stretching, but the fact is that it's utterly demoralizing: it's hard to motivate oneself to put in hard work when you're pretty certain that you won't be able to run more than a mile or two, and when, after a hard bike workout, it hurts to walk for several days.  Enough is enough.

So, tomorrow morning I'm having what's known as an IT band release.  In my case, this means that a nickel-sized piece will be cut out of the inside of my IT band, i.e., the part that rubs over my knee will no longer exist.  I know several people who've had this surgery, and their main thought is regret that they didn't have it done sooner.  Because nothing has to grow back together afterward, recovery is somewhat quicker than with, for example, an ACL repair.  My understanding is that I'll be on crutches and unable to do much at all for a week or so, but that I ought to be back up to spinning on a bike without resistance after a couple of weeks, and that things should progress from there.  Jogging can resume, slowly, after 5-6 weeks.

This is quite the opposite of how I'd like to be spending my January and February.  But, taking the long view, it's not really optional -- I just need to get it done.  And I've found that I tend to bounce back relatively quickly after layoffs like this one; indeed, some of my best seasons have come after my deepest fitness troughs.  It's never fun to rebuild running fitness, but I've done it before, and I'll do it again.  I just need to know that, when I head out the door, I won't pull up limping after a mile or two.

My positive spin on the whole thing is that this will give me all the motivation I need to become good friends with the neighborhood pool.  In the longer term, it's just a bump in the road.

Houston, We Have Ignition!

The blog's been a little quiet lately, but things have been afoot behind the scenes.  Indeed, they've been a big 'ol foot just lookin' for some ass to kick.  And now those feet are kickin' like Pete Jacobs on the business end of an Ironman.

EXIT TEAM Z

But let me back up.  Back in July, I posted about my decision to leave Team Z after nearly five years.  It was a difficult decision, as I had deep affection for the team and had done what small things I could to help it become more things to more athletes, so to speak.  I was quite fond of the coaches individually and collectively, and through the team, I'd met terrific training partners, many of whom eventually became close friends.

The problem was that I've always had trouble standing still.  In fact, thinking back on it, I probably could have become a better triathlete than I am merely by finding a coach, sticking with him, finding training routes and a routine that work, and practicing until perfect.  That's how greatness is achieved, I think: focusing on results, controlling the variables, and building brick by brick until you've built the Great Wall.  It's about steady progress and evolution, and it works.

But it's not how I work.  I thrive on novel challenges, not incremental gains.  The first triathlon I ever signed up for was an Ironman, and I signed up for it at a time when I didn't own a bike, couldn't swim, couldn't run more than three miles, and was heading into knee surgery.  The novelty -- and, ok, sure, the sheer terror -- pulled me so far out of my comfort zone that I felt my brain was expanding in time with my lung capacity.  I joined Team Z shortly after I survived that ordeal, and the newness of the rides, the people, and the training kept me going for quite awhile.  Over time, though, I came to feel like I was spinning my wheels, no pun intended.  The workouts and races individually were satisfying, but part of the joy of this sport is the feeling that one is out in the world exploring new places, visiting new towns and cresting new mountains.  I began to strike out on my own to an increasing degree, signing up for nutty races and rides in exotic (and sadistic) locations, and generally making my own way.  And others I knew were doing the same.

Cutting through the considerable drama, the basic problem was this: my training partners and I found ourselves doing our own thing more often than not, and it is difficult for a large organization to maintain an identity and coherence while tolerating factions going their own way.  The coaches on Team Z did their best to offer to bring our idiosyncratic race and training schedules into the team fold somehow -- to support our rides hither and yon, and to designate some of our chosen races as team races.  But it simply wasn't working; no organization can be everything to everyone.  Eventually the tensions became palpable, so we struck out on our own, and formed a new team with a core membership of the group of us who'd been training together for years.  Team Z would be just fine; indeed, it just won Competitor Magazine's award for "Best Tri Team: Mid-Atlantic"!  For a team that didn't exist until 2005, that's quite an achievement.

ENTER IGNITE ENDURANCE

On one level, founding a triathlon team is pretty straightforward: you get together and decide you're a triathlon team, and there you go.  Hopefully you can come up with a name that somehow combines "Superheroes" and "underpants," but I couldn't.  What did crop up in my mind was "Ignite Endurance," so named because our athletes compete in all sorts of things that aren't triathlon -- their common denominator is that, by the time you really wish they were done, you're about halfway to the finish line.

Of course, the notion of an endurance sports team is fundamentally odd considering that they're purely individual sports.  Even in tennis, swimming, track, and bowling, individual scores are aggregated to determine a winning team.  Not so in triathlon or marathoning; on some level, you're only a team insofar as you identify collectively with one another and train together.  You don't actually need to be on a team to do those things, and many aren't.  Yet triathlon teams are ubiquitous for the simple reason that people enjoy belonging to something larger than themselves, and that's a terrific thing.  In fact, the proliferation of amateur endurance sports teams is one of the only areas I can think of that's actively cutting against the trend of social atomization, where we live behind electronic walls and even phone conversations are sometimes deemed uncomfortably intrusive.  Yes, we may be Bowling Alone, but we're riding bikes together, dammit.

Interestingly, my experience in founding the team turned out to be easy in the ways I thought it would be near impossible, and exceedingly challenging in ways that never even surfaced on my radar.  We had about eight founding members, and our first task was to try to find a main sponsor, i.e., a bike or triathlon shop.  We imagined that this would be difficult, but we were fortunate to get a welcoming reception at a couple of shops, and we quickly agreed on the most natural fit: Tri360, a store that had yet to open.  Indeed, when we signed our sponsorship agreement, the store did not even have walls.  We were convinced to work with them because the founders, Kate and Blaine, were in the same position we were: starting a new venture and looking for a flexible, enthusiastic partnership.  And, more than that, they're the sort of people one doesn't often find owning a triathlon shop: down-to-earth, terrific folks who are genuinely interested in helping new athletes find their way in what can be an intimidating environment.  As someone who's spent a fair bit of time in bike shops, I can tell you that there's no more welcoming place for a new athlete -- especially a female athlete -- to go.  It's a pleasure to be sponsored by a company one really believes in, and they're obviously doing something right, having been awarded Competitor Magazine's award for "Best Triathlon Store: Mid-Atlantic" after less than a year in business.  We've also had a surprising degree of success in finding partnerships beyond Tri360: so far, we've linked up with Blue Seventy, GU Energy Labs, Skratch Labs, Rudy Project, Zoca Gear, and other terrific companies -- no bad shakes for a team that, until today, didn't even have a website.

But it was not all easy sailing.  The surprising part is that the most intractable challenges have been purely aesthetic.  Put it this way:

Me: "So, we need to settle on a color scheme."

Men: "We want to look like Batman."

Women: "No."

Men: "Aww, come on.  You'll look like Catwoman.  That's hot."

Women: "We have the sudden urge to shove this bike pump somewhere you didn't apply Body Glide."

Men: "So what do you want the colors to be?"

Women: "Teal."

Men: "Batman does not wear teal."

It burns!!!  It burns!!!

See, it turns out that men and women have almost entirely different taste, and ne'er the twain shall meet.  Eventually we settled on black and white, with a neon blue and accents of yellow.  Think that's the end of it?  Hah!  YOU try coming up with a logo that seven people agree on.  We were fortunate to have a skilled graphic designer on our team, but we drove the poor lad to distraction with such minute as the shape of our flame.  It ultimately turned out to be this, which I think is pretty kickass for something created from scratch.

And then, once you have team colors, and you have a logo, you need... kits.  Uniforms, that is, in cycling cool-kid jargon.  And here, you're faced with almost literally a blank page staring at you.  It's possible, of course, to work off of a template offered by one of the major companies, but these have a way of looking like exactly what they are: off-the-shelf models with your colors and icons.  It's not a bad way to go, but we wanted to do things right.  The problems will be familiar to anyone who's ever watched a team challenge on Project: Runway.  Triathletes, like fashion designers, are Type-A people with strong opinions, and when those opinions are combined, often the result is not a happy medium, but something that would make Tim Gunn bite his knuckles, inhale sharply, and say, "You know, I really like you as a designer, but I have to tell you I have some concerns about what the judges are going to say here."

But, after burning the midnight oil for a couple of weeks, we're getting there -- yesterday we sent our proofs off to Zoca, our apparel sponsors, and they look terrific.  What's more, Christmas came two weeks late to our humble collective, bringing with it a brand spanking new website!  (We're also on Twitter and Facebook.)  The end is in sight, and stepping back, it's amazing what we've put together.  We have a terrific group of 20 athletes who are ready to take on the world come the spring, and I'm not sure how I've gotten this lucky.

To infinity and beyond!  After my knee surgery.  What?  Oh, right, I didn't actually mention training or racing in this post.  How refreshing.  An oversight soon to be remedied!  Until next time, friends.

Am I MIA? What's been up.

Wow, it looks like it's been about six weeks since I last posted.  I haven't blogged for awhile because my mind simply has been elsewhere, and I never want triathlon, or the accompanying write-ups, to cross the line from an enthusiasm to an obligation.

Despite my lack of posts, though, a lot's been up, from injuries to races to founding a new triathlon team!  Here's the skinny.

I've been injured

In May, June, and July, I kept up kind of a ridiculous schedule.  Every other weekend I either ran a marathon or did a bike ride of 9+ hours, including the Boston Marathon, Big Sur Marathon, a 300k ride, a 400k ride, Mountains of Misery, 12 Hours of Cranky Monkey, and the Saratoga 12-Hour TT.  On my "off" weekends, I raced a couple of Olys.  It was all great fun, but I was left in mid July facing Ironman five weeks out, and I really hadn't done much in the way of consistent running.  So I started cranking up the running volume, and almost immediately got sidelined in a serious way.

It started out innocuously enough: an interval session on my trainer, followed by a 5-mile easy transition run.  Only, about three miles into the run, I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my right knee, and could barely put weight on it.  I had to gimp my way to a cab in order to get home.  This was not ideal.  It turned out that somehow I had completely trashed my IT band, an injury I've seen many times in others but never experienced myself.  My take-away is that it sucks in a very serious way.  In the five weeks before Ironman, I was not able to run a step, and I was getting massages 3-4x each week, foam rolling, and doing everything I possibly could simply to get to the starting line.  I also couldn't ride my bike; I had to bail after 30 minutes on an easy ride only two weeks out from Ironman.  Very, very bad.

As explained below, I did somehow make it through Ironman, but in doing so inflamed the injury again to such an extent that, once again, I couldn't do any real training.  So, at the moment, I'm almost 10 weeks out from the injury, and I've been unable to run or do serious riding for almost the entirety of that span.  Fortunately, I think I'm finally on the mend, but it has been an exceedingly discouraging process.

I've been racing, in the sense that I've participated in events known as races.

My seminal event for 2012 was Ironman Mont Tremblant, which I raced in August.  Readers of this blog will know that, after past Ironman events, I've written up pretty epic race reports.  After much consideration, I'm not going to do that for Tremblant.  It's been a very discouraging time athletically, what with the injury and all, and I've found that, with triathlon, I'm either "all in" or kind of unplugged.  In a time of discouragement and inability to train or race to my ability, it's been hard to imagine putting 8 or 9 hours into drafting a race report.  So, I'll simply provide a short recap.

It doesn't get more convenient than this.  I stayed at the Marriot.

The short and the long of Ironman Mont Tremblant is this: it's the best race I've ever done by a considerable margin.  It was simply spectacular from beginning to end -- gorgeous swim, bike, and run courses, the most convenient race staging I've ever seen, and flawless execution. One really can't ask for more.  Here's the view of the top of the finishing area from my hotel room balcony:

The finishing area itself was a Disney-esque festival scene:

And the village was pedestrian-friendly:

Here's a video taken from the free gondola, which soars over the village from the finish line/transition area at the bottom to the alpine slide at the top.

In the days before the race, the village really put on a show.  And, by that, I mean that they literally put on a show.  Specifically, a rock concert followed by fireworks.

The Friday night concert.  It was surprisingly outstanding.

You might think that fireworks before a triathlon would consist of a dude lighting off bottle rockets that fizzled into a vague M-Dot shape.  But this was an actual, honest-to-God show.  There were three songs -- care to guess?  Survivor, Journey, and U2.

Lake Tremblant.  Not suck.

As for the race, well.  I had a moderately crappy swim (1:05, compared to 1:00-1:02 for my last few races at this distance), but I'm not sure quite what I did wrong.  I simply found myself boxed in behind people swimming very slowly, and I couldn't make any meaningful progress for large stretches.  Eventually I just decided to take it easy and relax, so I moseyed on out in 1:04 or so and made a run for the timing mats, which were some distance away.

The bike course was a thing of wonder and joy.  I'd been riding well all summer, so I thought I could move pretty well on this course even with my 5-week injury layoff.  The course was a wonderful balance of long flats, long climbs, and steep rollers; in all, the elevation gain was pretty close to Lake Placid.  Fully 70% of the course had been repaved in the months before the race, so it was glass-like tarmac as far as the eye could see.  I touched my brakes all of 6 times in 112 miles, and 4 of those times were to do 180-degree turns around cones.  I executed exactly as I wanted to, turning in a split of 5:11, with the second half 5 minutes slower than the first due to easing off at the end in order to save something for the run.  This was a pretty big personal-best on an Ironman bike leg, but it was not an all-out effort by any stretch.  I thought I could have gone sub-5 if I'd been willing to leave it all out there.

One odd thing was that I basically had a personal draft marshal for about 30 miles straight -- he was never more than 100 yards from me in that entire 1.5-hour stretch.  I'd pass him, waive, and he'd stare at me in a vaguely Canadian way.  Occasionally he'd suggest that I drop back from 6.98 meters to 7.0 meters behind the person in front of me.  Annoyingly, though, the fact that he was right there all the time interfered with my pacing strategy on the climbs, which I tend to ride more slowly than comparable cyclists.  I take it easy up 'em, which means that people pass me routinely.  My normal approach is to mind my own business and keep chugging at my designated pace, and allow them to pull away -- they're going faster, after all.  But you can't do that with a best-buddy draft marshal next to you, or you risk getting flagged for not respecting the rules on being overtaken since you might not drop back quite quickly enough.  So I'd have to let off the gas substantially, thus causing more people to pass, and the cycle would repeat itself until I was doing little more than trying to coast up 1/2-mile-long climbs.  This is not awesome for average speed.  On a couple of occasions I probably made a poor decision by getting fed up with it and just blowing up the climbs at 450 watts for a minute or so, but it's what I felt like was the just and moral thing to do.   Dammit.

The run wasn't much to write home about, but I suspected it wouldn't be, given my complete lack of running.  The first and last miles of each run loop are quite hilly, and I was both injured and under-trained (as a result of the injury).  The constant up-and-down caused my ITBS to flare up pretty quickly, which meant the last 20 miles was a gimpfest.  All told, a 4:22, well off of what I'd have liked.

Despite a poor swim and run, I chalked up a 10:47, which was a 40-minute PR, so I can't be too upset about it.  The only tragic thing about Ironman Tremblant is that I'm not racing it next year.  What a race.

After Tremblant, my leg was once again in limp mode, and training was out of the question even if I'd had the motivation to do it, which, immediately post-IM, I clearly did not.  I was already signed up for Nations and Savageman Olys, so I raced to the extent of putting up a pair of rather lame 2:23's (I was sub-2:10 in June), but they were enjoyable anyway.  One thing that's clear to me is that success at shorter distance races requires an enthusiasm for suffering; without it, one simply can't do well.  It's never a good thing for achievement when, in an Oly, I find myself thinking that various competing riders look solid as I'm cheerfully getting dropped without protest.  On the other hand, though, this is all about fun at the end of the day, and I'll get 'em once I get back into competition mode.  There's nothing wrong with actually enjoying the scenery every now and then.  Maybe my injury was life's way of telling me to do more of that.

What's on the horizon

Lots of exciting stuff!

The biggest piece of news is that, in July, together with a group of longtime friends and training partners, I founded a new tri team, Ignite Endurance: Sparked by Tri360.  I'll have a lot more to say about the team in a separate post, but suffice it to say that things are going very well -- we have a terrific roster of down-to-earth athletes, and we're thrilled to be working with a great new shop with a refreshingly welcoming attitude toward athletes of all levels of experience.  We'll be leading regular rides and runs for athletes of all ability levels, and also doing our level best to make a splash on race day.

Beyond that, this week I've been able to start running and riding again, and I'm delighted to be on comeback road.  Tragically, my scale has reminded me that there's a little too much of me going around at the moment, so I have some work to do.  But I'm not rushing myself to get back into it -- I do my best racing and training when I let my body and brain decide when it's the right priority to have.  My next race will probably be the Waterman's half-Ironman in September.

More soon!

Should one race two Ironmans in a year?

It's that crazy time of year once more: Ironman signup season, and especially for people on a team, it's easy to get swept up in the enthusiasm (or peer pressure, depending on one's point of view).  It's like a perverse sort of adult Christmas morning, hitting refresh on one's web browser in the desperate hope to have the privilege of paying $700-$1,200 in order to compete in an Ironman a year out.

Lately a couple of newer athletes have asked whether it's feasible to compete in more than one Ironman in a year -- Ironman Lake Placid in July and then Florida in November, or perhaps CDA/Arizona.  It's tough to know how to answer this question.  I've done it twice, IMUSA/Cozumel in 2009, and then Wales/Cozumel in 2011, and I have distinctly mixed feelings on it.

As an initial matter, I firmly believe that most athletes these days jump too quickly to Ironman from short distance races.  It's almost like people view Ironman as the only race worth doing, or at least as the clear "ASAP" goal, even if the goal is only to finish under 17 hours.  I don't understand why.  If the goal is to do your best at Ironman, as opposed to merely finish it, the optimal approach almost certainly is to spend at least a couple of years training very hard and competing at shorter distances first.  It's much easier to add endurance to speed than to add speed to endurance.  Almost every top-level Ironman triathlete was first a world class short-course triathlete, and the same holds for marathoners, who often were tearing up the 5,000m or 10,000m distances before going longer.  People who move quickly to competing in Ironmans often find that they don't get much faster in the course of training for those events.

On a personal note, I don't think that there's anything inherently more impressive about Ironman races than Olympics or half-IMs.  Going all-out in shorter races is painful as hell, and people who do it successfully must be hard as nails.  It's also possible to have considerably more of a life outside of the sport.  I think there's a great argument for simply focusing on short-course races for a long time.

All of which is to say, before deciding whether to sign up for two Ironmans in a year, I think it's worth asking seriously whether it's in your best interest to sign up for even one.  Assuming you're firmly committed to racing at least one Ironman, my view is that racing a second one doesn't require too much more, at least physically.  If one were to race IMUSA in July, it's easy to take two or three weeks off, and then to ramp up the training again in mid August, and to push through November or whenever the second race might be.  There's the risk of overuse injury, of course, but I don't think this is dramatically higher simply because one does a second Ironman a few months after the first.

But this isn't to say that I think doing a second one is a good idea.  Rather, the point is that the chief sources of difficulty in adding the second Ironman are mental, emotional, and social, rather than physical.  When you're signing up for races a year out, a two-Ironman season sounds exciting and romantic.  But consider the reality of how triathlon training is often structured.  Ironman athletes often are told spend the winter training for a marathon, and then to roll the running fitness over into triathlon once the weather warms up enough to make cycling outdoors enjoyable.  In practice, someone might start training in December for a March marathon.  After the marathon's done, you're staring directly at triathlon season, and the ramp up to the first Ironman quickly begins.  After the July race, you takes a couple of weeks off, and then you train intensely again through the second Ironman in November.

Add up all of the training and racing commitments, and you find yourself training hard from December of the first year straight through November of the second year.  I'm about as motivated as athletes come, but I'll tell you that this is not trivial.  Even if you're not injury-prone, training at that level requires regular sacrifices of your social or family life, and it is virtually impossible to keep motivation from flagging.  It's quite likely that, after you race a marathon and the first Ironman and is staring at the second, you won't be jazzed about 120-mile bike rides and 20-mile runs.  The second Ironman can easily come to seem more like an arduous obligation, rather than a fun goal.  And, because you've already finished one Ironman, it's all too easy to take the training for granted since the fear factor no longer looms as large.  As a result, the second race often doesn't go very well.

In sum, in my experience, there's nothing more likely to kill your enjoyment of endurance sports than to train for an Ironman for which you're not enthusiastic, and that enthusiasm very difficult to predict a year or more out.  If you do make it through the second Ironman successfully, it's very likely that you'll be extremely burned-out afterward.  The most natural thing will be to take a few months off, only to find the next spring that all of the benefit from the work you put in the year before has disappeared.  It can be extremely frustrating.

To be sure, there are some people who can train for Ironman after Ironman without batting an eyelash.  They simply love the lifestyle and there's nothing they'd rather be doing.  I think, however, that such people are a small minority, and it's very dangerous to ascribe those characteristics to yourself before you've been around the sport for awhile.  Most people simply need to recharge their batteries, to reconnect with family and friends, to read books, to travel without a bicycle, and generally to do other things.  I don't mean to judge either type of person -- different strokes for different folks.  It's just that you should be honest with yourself about which camp you're in, and it's very difficult to know that you'll be motivated to train for two Ironmans before you've even trained for the first one.

If you do decide to commit to a two-Ironman year, my view is that it might be a mistake to train for a marathon during the winter before.  Instead, you might be better off training for a hard 5k or 10k.  There are two reasons for this.  The first is mental: if you're going to be training for two Ironmans in a row, the chief difficulty is going to be motivational, so don't tap that well any earlier than you need to.  Three-hour runs during the dead of winter can be extremely draining, and it might be better to spend the winter on short, fast training that isn't as much of a burden on your life.  The second reason is physical: if you're is training for two Ironmans, then you're probably not going to get much faster in that time.  You'll get get better at going longer at a steady effort, but training for Ironman is not the way to get fast.  In fact, it may actually make you slower.  The general philosophy of periodization is that your training should get more race-like as the goal race approaches, and for Ironman, that means very long runs and rides.  The flip side of the equation is that, the further you are from the goal race, the more you should be focusing on other limiters.   Spending the winter really working on top-end cycling and running speed can pay huge dividends once it comes time to go longer.

On the subject of winter marathons, a couple of years ago the guys at Endurance Nation put out a couple of videos explaining why, in their view, people training for Ironman should consider not running a winter marathon.  This view is controversial, but I personally agree with it.  Here's the first:

And here's a follow-up:

Admittedly, although these videos reflect my personal views, I haven't always practiced what I'm now preaching.  Last year I trained very hard for a winter marathon, and in fact I wound up running two, at Shamrock and Eugene.  I then went on to race Ironmans Wales and Cozumel.  The reason I ran the marathons, though, was that I had a specific goal of qualifying for Boston, and that goal was entirely unrelated to my desire to do well at Ironman.  Indeed, when I got back on the bike in May, after my second marathon, I was utterly useless for a couple of months.  It was not pretty.  It's also true that I finished Ironman Cozumel utterly demoralized and injured; I took fully two months off of training, and really wanted nothing to do with endurance sports for quite awhile.  It's not an outcome I'd recommend pursuing.

In all, I'd suggest making enjoyment of the sport the highest priority.  Life's too short to do anything else, and certainly you should be careful not to get swept up in others' enthusiasm.  Make the choice for the right reasons, and be honest with yourself about why you're doing it, what you're sacrificing to make it happen, and what you're trying to get out of it.

Getting it Done in Druid Hills

Today I raced what was, by a great margin, my shortest tri ever: the Druid Hills Sprint in Baltimore.  A 300-yard pool swim, 7.5-mile bike, and 5k run.  The idea originally was to race the Culpeper Oly two weeks out from Tremblant, and then this one, one week out, as a last-minute tuneup.  After spending May, June, and early July on ultracycling pursuits and the occasional short tri, I wanted spend the six weeks or so before Tremblant sharpening up my speed and working on my running.

But it didn't work out that way.  In mid July, about a week after the Saratoga 12-hour race, I did an easy brick workout, but three miles into the run, I felt my IT Band seize up and suddenly I could barely put weight on my leg.  I had to take a cab home, and I had trouble walking for several days afterward.  In fact, I had to take nearly two weeks off of both cycling and running at exactly the time when I should have been doing the last big push before the Ironman taper.  I've been doing everything in my power to treat the problem aggressively, from icing, stretching, and foam rolling to massage and chiropractic care.

This has all been pretty demoralizing, because at the moment I got injured, I was riding, running, and swimming better than ever, and my race results were showing it.  And I'm not injury-prone -- my last running injury was nearly six years ago.  But I think that the sheer volume of cycling, including two 12-hour races 14 days apart, was simply excessive when paired with even a scaled-back running plan.

Starting about a week ago, I was able to begin riding again, but I bagged the Culpeper race last Saturday, and even then, last Sunday I dropped out of an easy bike ride after 30 minutes because my knee was tightening up.  Things were not looking great for Tremblant.

Fortunately, I think I may have played my limited hand as well as I could have, because I was able to get through today's race (which included a 5k) without any pain or sensitivity.  In fact, somehow I managed to win the thing overall. The field was not a strong one, and my run wasn't what I'd have liked (a very cautious 20:40), but I was pretty happy with my swim and bike performances, and the key thing is that I've gained some confidence that I'll be able to give it a go next weekend in Quebec without thinking every step about my knee.

Sometimes things don't work out the way we plan, but this experience has reaffirmed the importance of being honest about injuries and not trying to press through them.  I didn't run a step for five weeks, but hopefully my caution has prevented an acute problem from becoming chronic.

And what better way to celebrate a return to health than with my first overall race win?  Rollin' on!

Product Review: Altolab Hypoxic Trainer

A few weeks back, I engaged in my annual stupid tradition of impulsively signing up for an inaugural Ironman in a beautiful place that presents an opportunity for an "interesting race report experience."  In 2009, it was the Cozumel Mosquito Coast.  In 2011, it was Tropical Storm Wales.  This year will be Mont Tremblant, and in 2012, it'll be Lake Tahoe.  Tahoe will be gorgeous; the problem is, the swim is at 6,200 feet, and the bike climbs well above 7,000 feet.  It won't be possible to get there more than a couple of days in advance, so I got to thinking, how am I going to do this?  And I did some research.

Many people have heard of the benefits of altitude training.  It turns out that the benefits aren't clear-cut, because while living at altitude has a stimulatory effect on red blood cell count, it also inhibits recovery and doesn't allow one to train as intensely.  The response has been the so-called "live high, train low" approach, in which people live at high altitude, but do their intense training at low altitude.  There are only a few places where this is possible, however, and it's certainly not possible for the everyday age grouper.

Hypoxico altitude tent


Enter altitude tents.  These are portable airtight canopies that one puts over one's bed, and they're connected to large, heavy, expensive ($5,000) units that look like portable generators.  These units substitute nitrogen for oxygen, and thereby create lower oxygen percentages, much (but not exactly) as one would find at altitude.  Athletes sleep in these tents at up to 10,000 feet or so for a period of weeks leading up to a race.  The tents can be effective, but they're uncomfortable to sleep in due to noise from the generator and buildup of heat and humidity within the tent.  I owned one of these for a year or so, and I found that I had so much trouble sleeping in it that the downsides outweighed the benefits.  Still, I considered renting one of these for a couple of weeks before Lake Tahoe; they can be found for a few hundred dollars for brief periods.

In the course of my research, though, I stumbled upon a solution I hadn't seen previously: the Altolab system. These aren't cheap -- about $600 -- but in the world of altitude simulators, that's not too bad.  I decided to take the plunge, reasoning that I could benefit from altitude training for races leading up to Tahoe as well.

The Altolab system works on the principle of intermittent hypoxic exposure, i.e., brief periods of relatively intense hypoxication with recoveries in between.  In an altitude tent system, you might sleep for 8 hours at a simulated 10,000 feet.  With Altolab, in contrast, the protocol is one session per day, and the session is 6 reps of 6 minutes of hypoxication, followed by 4 minutes of breathing normally.  The key is that the Altolab can simulate much higher altitudes than the tents -- if a tent can simulate up to 10,000 feet, a typical level, the Altolab can simulate well in excess of 20,000 feet.  In the world of altitude training, a tent can be thought of as a very long Z2 run, whereas the Altolab is more like intense hill repeats for a shorter period.  Research on runners and cyclists has shown a clear performance benefit from intermittent hypoxic exposure, a technique that was originally developed by the former Soviet Union.

The Altolab system is dead simple to use, although it's somewhat hard to describe.  It consists of three basic parts: (i) a breathing tube with mouth piece that's connected to a bacterial filter; (ii) a green hypoxic silo cylinder; and (iii) several "altomixer" cylinders.  The green hypoxic silo consists of particles of soda lime, a chemical that absorbs CO2, and the altomixers contain sponges that simply inhibit air flow to a minor extent.  The functional principle is that, when one inhales, the gas consists of a high percentage of oxygen.  The oxygen is absorbed by the lungs, and when it's expelled, it contains more CO2 and less oxygen, along with some nitrogen.  Normally, when one inhales fresh air, the level of oxygen inhaled remains constant.  The Altolab changes that, because when one exhales into it, the soda lime in the green hypoxic silo absorbs the exhaled CO2, leaving only a reduced level of oxygen, as well as the nitrogen.  On the next inhalation through the Altolab, the removed CO2 is replaced by additional oxygen and nitrogen (fresh air), but the exhaled nitrogen remains.  The overall effect is that, when one breathes through the Altolab, the percentage of oxygen inhaled decreases, and the percentage of nitrogen inhaled increases.  (This is why the system is different than breathing through a long tube -- there, the CO2 remains, and you'll eventually hyperventilate trying to get oxygen.)

An Altolab kit comes with 6 black "altomixer" cylinders, and each cylinder used increases the simulated altitude by about 5,000 feet.  Use four of them, and you're essentially breathing at 20,000 feet, which is like being on the peak of Denali.

All of this may sound speculative and gimmicky, but it quite clearly works.  The Altolab comes with a fingertip device that displays blood oxygen levels in realtime.  Normal oxygen saturation is about 98%, but using four Altomixers, at the end of six minutes, I can see my blood oxygen levels dip to about 75%.  This is interesting to play with: take just one normal breath in the middle of a 6-minute interval, and after about 20 seconds, my blood oxygen level spikes back up into the mid 90s before dropping again.  In other words, the altitude simulation demonstrably works.

The AltoLab training protocol is pretty straightforward: an hour a day (6 minutes on, 4 minutes off, and repeat 6 times) for 15 days.  In those 15 days, one gradually adds black Altomixer stacks according to a prescribed schedule, which gradually increases simulated altitude.  After that, every three weeks, one performs a 5-day "top-off" session at a pretty high simulated altitude.  These sessions are easy to do while watching tv or doing anything passive, although they tend to make one a little spacey, so no driving, and probably no reading.

An important note: the soda lime in the green hypoxic silo, which absorbs CO2, becomes exhausted after a couple of uses and must be replaced.  These silos are quite pricey ($15 ea or so, even if purchased in bulk). Thus, if bought in the usual way, each day of altitude simulation will run $7.50-$8.00.  That's still not exorbitant compared to the cost of buying or renting a hypoxic tent, but there's a better way: one can purchase soda lime directly from a medical supply company and simply replace the soda lime in the hypoxic silo.  Using this approach drops the price to about $1/day (not counting the initial investment), which is very affordable.  Below is a video showing how it's done -- though, note that the manufacturer does not endorse this approach.

In all, this is a pretty cool product -- easy to transport (unlike an altitude tent and generator), and reasonably affordable, considering the alternatives.  I've completed a 15-day cycle, and I'm now in the midst of my first top-off phase.  It's been pretty straightforward, although it does make one tired afterward.  I'll be interested to see the results in my races!