TRAINING MY WAY part II

Rest and Recovery 

I wrote about planning the training in Part I of this four part Training My Way post. Now, if everything was perfect, we would have planned and executed our training so as to be always fresh and ready for the key training sessions. Often life changes things a little however, and we will find ourselves tired earlier than expected. Then, you will have to be able to listen to your body and adapt the plan accordingly. I've found this to be a lot harder than it sounds. Triathletes are usually goal driven and very motivated and it's hard to step away from the path you've chosen. Also, to make positive adaptations to our fitness, we'll have to push our limits a bit but it can be a fine line between over-training and over-reaching, which, when applied correctly, leads to supercompensation. You have to maintain clear sight of the big picture and make decisions so that you'll eventually reach your goals. I like to guide my decisions with questions like: "Do I have to miss tomorrow's key session or will the quality of it suffer if I'll push through today's session even though I'm really tired?".

It has been stated by many coaches and athletes that the single most important contributor to the recovery of an athlete is sleep. I've always managed with a little less sleep, an ability I've inherited from my mother who I remember sleeping as little as four hours a night when I was a kid and she was making a career. For me, around six hours was often enough when I was a student but now with an additional stressor from the training, I need to get closer to eight hours of sleep a night. This here is probably the biggest limiter for my improvement as a triathlete at the moment. As a pilot I would have a decent amount of time to train, even as much as twenty hours a week, because of flight regulations on maximum duty hours. But having to fly through half a dozen time zones and basically missing two nights of sleep every week and then trying to sleep when the body says it's day has naturally a big influence on my ability to recover. If I try to dismiss this fact, the sleep deprivation leads quickly to lower performance and I get sick easily. For this reason I'm keeping a sleep log, aiming to maintain at least the average sleeping time at around eight hours. Sometimes I'm also using an iPhone application called Sleep Time to monitor the quality of sleep. I don't know about the accuracy or even the usefulness of the data, but at least it makes for nice graphs and statistics.

Omegawave is another app or service I'm using to monitor my system. Of course the most important thing in order to stay healthy and to be able to train efficiently is to listen to yourself. But sometimes things happen so gradually that it's hard to detect the symptoms of, for example, overtraining. Omegawave can be really helpful in this regard. During this spring, they're going to launch a big update and some new features including training plans that adapt according to the daily measurements. I'm looking forward to it!

As my training log, I've been using TrainingPeaks for over two years now. For those unfamiliar with this very popular web-based service, they have a system, which gives you a score (TSS, Training Stress Score) for all of your training sessions based on the intensity and time of the session. For different sports there are different ways to determine the intensity and for example in swimming and running your pace is compared to your threshold pace and in cycling the Watts you put out are compared to your threshold power. Intensity can be also heart rate based. This system allows you to compare the stress effects of totally different training sessions and to estimate the cumulative effect of all the sessions together. I've found this to be very helpful in optimizing my training and aiming the peak fitness for A-races. Highly recommended!

One of the cool features in TrainingPeaks is the Performance Management Chart. It depicts your fitness (blue line), fatigue (pink line) and their subtraction, form (yellow line).