One Week to Trials

Ok, we're officially at one week to trials. Ill be driving out to Oklahoma next Monday with my teammate and housemate Ian Ross. We'll meet up wit the rest of the team (who's mostly flying) once we're out there. I've been tapering pretty seriously for the past week and a half already. I felt aggressively over trained with about 3 weeks to prep for trials. I was tired constantly, I had a high resting heart rate, I dreaded practices, my times had severely gotten worse, and I had lost all my fire. As terrible as I felt at the time, I was happy about it. It was a sign that I had done all I could to prep for the season, and I had hit a wall with just enough time to rest it off and recover for the first big race. All good training comes with highs and lows, and it was time for me to be smart about training and force a high for trials. I'm pretty sure the final kicker was a crazy weights workout I had done the week before. I did 500 reps of bench or bench pull each day with my 30 rep max weight (50kg). It was a crazy couple rainy days of weights that required more recovery time then I had realized.

Anyway, for the past 2 weeks or so I've cut out a lot of extra weights and runs. I now run only to warm up and lift to maintain or pump up the muscles a little before a paddle. A lot of European teams are huge on the pre-paddle weights. They love doing a few quick power sets to get the blood moving before hitting the water. It's a great warm up strategy.

With paddles, we're still doing a lot of pieces per workout: 8-20 pieces of a various distance or amount of time. For example: 10x 300m or 20x 2mins on. These workouts are great for endurance building, but as I began my early taper, I had to focus on building intensity over building endurance. So, in order to make these workouts a bit more intensity-friendly I started doing a lot of "picking my pieces." I would do every other piece of the workout hard with high intensity and in between these, focus more on technique and race plan. I'd stay mentally in the game on all pieces, but alternate steady/hard.

Last week was a pretty rough low-point for me. It's hard to get pumped for practice when you feel tired and weak constantly. I was mentally struggling. But I've heard in rumor that "the days you struggle the most are also the days you improve the most." So that kept me going, as well as the thought that I was beginning my taper and it was all uphill from there.

It's crazy how a few rest days can completely turn you around. The lighter work load from last week had a huge impact on this week. I remember vividly waking up Monday and realizing that my fire was back. I hopped out of bed before the sun came up and knew I was ready to go. I could feel my uphill climb in effect.

This week has been a lot of intensity work. We'll have time trials on Saturday: 1000m, 500m, and 200m. At trials women will only race the 500m and 200m. Thus far my times on Saturday time trials had been slow, but I'm looking forward to seeing where my times are after a solid taper.

One Month to Trials

Hi guys,

Here I am just one month out from my first sprint regatta of the year. Interestingly, this first one is also the biggest one, at least in my eyes. It's tryouts for the national sprint team. Last summer I was fortunate enough to make incredible gains in just a few months of very intense training, most of which i had the pleasure of doing overseas. But as a smart man once told me, 'the year you see results is the year after you train hard' (credit Drew Story). This leaves huge implications for the upcoming season.

Thus far this winter, I've been working out an average of 5 hours a day, 6 days a week. We start at 6am with a half hour run, followed by an hour lift, and an hour of technical steady-paced paddling. After that, it's breakfast, nap, work or hang time, and then afternoon practice. In the afternoons it's an hour of intensity work on the water (sprints or intervals of some kind), followed by another half hour of running or lifting, depending on the day.

It's been an unusually long winter in Georgia, as I notice was true for most of the nation. During days/weeks of rough weather, I put more of an emphasis on weights. It's easy to lift in any weather, and strength can have a dramatic affect on speed. I did a lot of bench and bench pull: alternating push and pull muscle group days. I'm happy with where my weights are as I enter the last stretch to trials. These days I'm doing workouts consisting of 6 sets of 30 reps on bench press (or bench pull) with 50kg or 110lbs. I've been focusing on higher rep (30rep) stuff to stimulate the feel of a sprint while in the weight room.

Long monotonous months of winter training can tell you a lot about your mind and body. With this much work per day, paddling has truly become a life style for me. I find myself reading a lot on sports psychology or nutrition. I highly recommend the book "the Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle. It revolutionized the way I look at practices. Seriously, it's an excellent read.

I also feel myself going through intense highs and lows week to week. If you are pushing at your physical max (and being honest with yourself on this point), your body will need rest time. I'm very strict about taking Sundays off, but sometimes I require even more down time. I've found that I go through cycles. I have days where I feel an unreal amounts of energy; followed by days where I'm strong as hell but more composed; then days where I go down in weights; and eventually I enter a state of constant fatigue, food cravings, and exhaustion. These times call for a nice little break (3-7 days) of mornings off and maybe just a little afternoon paddle to loosen up: just enough to reboot and start the cycle over again. Progress is never a steady sloping line; it's a graph resembling a heart beat electrocardiograph: highs and lows. Actually because of this, the German team has adopted a 4 week training schedule of extremely intense training 6 days a week for 3 weeks, with the last week completely off. These guys might have it right.

As I get closer to trials, I'll begin my taper. I was reading a study earlier today on the philosophies of tapering. There is a lot of research out there on tapering for swimmers which is cool because, ya know, it seems like they've got a lot I common with us. This study said with a good 2 week taper in which the athlete drops 60-80% of workout volume while maintaining workout intensity, swimmers were about to improve times 4-8%! Once I did the math, I realized that means a solid taper could improve a 500m sprint time 5-10 seconds. That's unreal. Man, I hope that can work for me.