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.