Recently in Injury Prevention, Recovery, Healing, and Performance Enhancement Category

In the last few months, I've been really into Total Immersion and their teaching method. Swimming is one of those activities which require mastery of so many little details that trying to learn swimming all at once is very very difficult. So they do a great job of breaking down technique with drills, and enforcing focus on only one thing at a time so that you can master that without getting confused by other things you're trying to learn. Thus, I've spent the last many months, and plan on for the better part of this year, in breaking down exactly what is wrong with my stroke and working on each individual part one at a time.

This has led me to believe that its teaching concepts in the area of form training can be applied to any other physical activity, especially in the case of cycling and running for me. In thinking about this, I thought I could encapsulate it in the 4 S's of form training:

1. SYSTEM: You must have a system for identifying problems, removing bad habits and imprinting new and correct habits. With TI, they've done all that for you. Running has some great methods now (ie. ChiRunning, Pose Method) that strive to break down running so that you can focus on parts of your form. I have not found that to be true yet of cycling and would love to be pointed to some that discuss cycling form.

Without a system, you will inevitably try to do too much at once and see little or no improvement as old habits remain ingrained, and you can't imprint new correct ones. It also means that you are hampering your brain/body's ability to imprint new habits; someone once told me that you have to do something about 45 days or so to imprint a new habit. This means that you have to perform the new habit in the new way that many times exactly!

2. SENSITIVITY: You need to develop and have a sensitivity to what you're doing wrong and also what you're doing right. When habits become ingrained, they become commonplace and we don't even notice when we're doing something. This is both good and bad. Correct habits ingrained means we're unconsciously performing optimally and not exerting excess energy and brain power to maintain activity. But if we've ingrained a bad habit, we may actually not know we're doing something wrong because we've been doing it that way for so long. So we need to develop the body awareness to know how are bodies are moving both when we're moving slow and especially when we're moving fast. Slow is much easier, but when we're cycling our arms and legs fast this may become too much to easily discern how and where are body parts are moving. Once we can know when we're doing something wrong, then we can take steps to fix that.

3. SUSTAINABILITY: Once we ingrain new habits, we must be able to sustain them over the course of training and during the long hours of a race. Thus, we must be constantly wary of falling into old bad habits especially when we get tired and/or we lose our mental focus. Training only good habits and extending them over time will ingrain good form that is sustainable over a long time, ensuring an efficient race (and probably also injury free).

4. SYMMETRY: One thing that gets sometimes overlooked is the importance of symmetry of habits on each side of your body. We humans are built with two halves, both mirror images of each other. But unfortunately, we often perform the same activity differently on each side of our body due to old habits, favoring our strong side, muscle inbalances, etc. So while our form may be great on one side, we may find that the other side is challenged. Therefore, training to make sure that we even out both sides to equal form is important or else bad form on one side can actually affect performance on the other side.

Going back to the first S which is SYSTEM, it may be hard to find a system for your activity. TI does a great job for swimming and there are some running ones, but for cycling it may be hard. But finding a great SYSTEM will enable SUSTAINABILITY and SYMMETRY more, and help you train your brain to be more SENSITIVE.

A little while back my sports medicine doc recommended I try Yin Yoga, which is a form of yoga where you are put in a stretching position and then directed to relax completely for a very long time, like 3-5 minutes. Previously I was taught to stretch 20-30 seconds; this is probably good enough for a warmup or cool down, but it didn't address tougher situations like tightness that has been present for a long time, or releasing fascial tightness.

I went to a Yin Yoga class and unfortunately thought it was kind of bogus. Not bogus in its practice, but bogus in the fact that I had to pay $20 for an hour of super long stretching.

So no more dishing out $20, but I do now do some super long stretching at home. One I've been working on is laying on a foam roller, and then letting one arm, bent at 90 degrees and held perpendicular to the body, just drop with its own weight over a period of 3-4 minutes. I have found that my pectoralis minor has been really tight due to swimming, and I need to get it and the supporting fascia to release. The only way to do this is to relax completely, and let my arm slowly drift downward as muscles, joints, and fascia slowly release their tension. It's kind of amazing; over 3 minutes, my arm will start out there in the air and then slowly drop all the way down to the ground.

The trick is to put yourself in a position to relax completely. This means that you can't be supporting yourself with a hand or arm; that will automatically put tension in your body. I bought a cotton bolster which I sometimes use to lay on and support myself while stretching various body areas.

I tried this many years ago when I took martial arts. It was my lifelong dream to do Chinese splits. But I never could do it. In fact, I would sometimes pull muscles by stretching too long. I think my mistake back then was that I needed to find a way to stretch muscles and be able to get completely relaxed. If I tense up at any point, it could set me up for potentially overstretching my muscles and hurting myself. Perhaps I will try again to attain the Chinese split position and finally achieve my own Jean Claude Van Damme super split kicks!

Rummaging through some old papers, I found a note scribbled by my doctor about how much protein intake someone should have during heavy training. He said that you should take 0.85 to 1.0 grams/kg of body weight every day, if you're in a heavy training period.

I weigh about 150 lbs., or 68 kg. Therefore, I should be taking in about 68 grams of protein each day. Looking back on my typical long training day, I'd actually not eat much until after my swim/ride/run - about 8.5 hours later. Then I'd eat a cake of tofu and a bowl of rice, and then a big dinner. But that doesn't add up 68 grams of protein; it'd often fall short.

For Ironman CDA 2009, I really was training hard on my long days. But my recovery would often stretch out to 4 days where I could not do my normal loads until then. It was not until I started taking extra protein in the form of powder dumped into my normal recovery drink that amazingly my recovery was brought in an astounding 2 days!

I never would have thought that I wasn't eating enough to recover. Obviously I was wrong. Now I supplement with protein powder in my recovery drink regularly to make sure I get enough protein to repair my damaged muscles, and to make sure I am as fully recovered, in as short a time as possible.

Check out this shot of a poster in my PT's office:

It looked eerily like my X-ray many years ago when it was determined that my right leg was about 1/8" shorter than my left. The whole body gets jacked, the spine even curves to compensate. Impact forces from running get transmitted along a crooked axis up my body, really causing tons of problems because the muscles and bones just aren't lined up optimally to take the stress. Pedaling on the bike doesn't have impact forces to deal with, but man think of the weird stresses on my muscles/joints/bones due to the fact that one foot needs to extend a tiny bit longer than the other to transmit power to the pedals!

Thankfully in my case, it was not a basic structural issue (ie. my body's bones weren't actually 1/8" shorter in my right leg) and a functional issue. ART and Graston released the muscles that were shortened and/or tightening up to draw my right leg up. Then, muscle strengthening, balance training, and correcting/refining my swim/bike/run technique helped prevent it from coming back and causing injury or other problems.

All I can say is, take the time to go through treatment. Embrace the time and cost to truly fix the problem if it is functional versus structural (in which case you'll need shims or similar). Know that you will have to break old physical movement habits and engage new ones. I guarantee you that the pain and frustration you are experiencing in your training/racing now will diminish greatly, or go away completely...

Around 2004, I had been doing triathlons for about 2 years and was aiming for my first marathon, the NYC marathon, in the fall of 2004. It was during this training period that I went to my physical therapist at the time who took an X-ray of my spine and saw that it was curved, due to the fact that my right leg was shorter than my left which jacked my spine due to my hip being not level. Because of this imbalance, all sorts of weird problems kept coming up in my knees, IT band, calves - you name it, it was hurtin'!

The fix was to get some hard orthotics, made from carbon fiber no less, and to shim up my right heel by about 1/8". He told me that this was very common and that this should fix a lot of things. After using these hard orthotics for a little while, they cured not only my pronation related problems but also removed a lot of other nagging problems. I was ecstatic! While I wasn't totally problem free, I was at least on the path to making it to the NYC marathon in one piece.

Then I discovered ART. And more significantly, I started using ART for performance enhancement, not just curing and managing my problem areas. In my case, this involved freeing up my hip areas where it meets the top of the leg. When my PT worked on these areas, he discovered so much constriction and adhesions that had developed over decades of being non-athletic and sedentary. He aggressively and regularly worked my psoas and glute muscles, and of course continued working on my quads, IT band, and hamstrings. The net effect was that all of sudden when I was struggling to run 2:00 400s on the track, this dropped instantly by 15 seconds after only 2 weeks!

This is significant, but not quite the focus of this post - the other effect was that after working on the whole leg, and using anatomy train and kinetic chain concepts in his ART treatment, he would place both legs together to assess the difference in leg lengths and....now they were both the same length!

Whoa. All this time, I was thinking that perhaps I was just born with a slightly shorter right leg and now that was clearly not the case. What was going on?

In the course of many discussions with my PTs over time, I had discovered that this is often a common phenomenon with many athletes. As a matter of fact, I encountered this often in magazine articles when they talk about cyclists, who after going to get an expensive bike fit, will be recommended a heel lift on one leg to help balance out power output. In subsequent discussions, I also learned that some people ARE actually born with a severe leg length differences, sometimes over 1/2"! I can't imagine what that would feel like when walking, but then we just adjust our bodies to do so and we don't feel any problems until something bad happens and we come into PT to get assessed and realize that we're not symmetrical.

However, given my own experience with this on my own body, I know it's curable. And in talking with my PT about it, he thinks it's curable in over 90% of the cases. Wow. Something as simple as a leg length difference, which would be caused by all sorts and types of muscle imbalances, leading to injury due to the imbalance and uneven stresses on your body parts. And totally curable, but without the need for a crutch such as a heel lift or shim.

Why is the heel lift/shim a crutch? Because it doesn't address the actual problem but only puts a bandaid on it. Think about what could cause your leg to be shorter than the other. In my case, it was a lot of bunched up, super tight muscles up by the hip area that were so tight and inflexible that they yanked my entire leg upward into the hip joint, causing a shortness of about 1/8". So now I put a shim under my foot and at least I'm not running unbalanced, but my muscles are still constricted up there. Over time, this can cause all sorts of problems in the muscles, affect your speed, and potentially cause wearing down of the hip joint because additional pressure is being put in the ball and socket there. Isn't this bad?

It is unfortunate that so many people are not aware of a cure for leg length problems and prescribe such things as heel lifts and shims. I am also surprised that those who do know unfortunately are not very likely to seek treatment and go through what it takes to remove this problem. Instead, they would rather just put a shim under their heel and go on with their lives because it's easier, and certainly less expensive and less troublesome than going to a competent PT who can eliminate this problem over time.

Personally, I would rather not put a bandaid on a problem and make time to completely remove the problem which I know will extend my ability to race injury free for many years to come.

A buddy of mine asked me how I go out there and just run long, day after day, week after week. Here is the email I sent him:

You have hit on a key element in long distance racing, which is the mental aspect.

Some things to try:

1. Get used to the time. If you do this a lot, pretty soon you'll just be used to being out there that long.

2. Grow to just love running. If you love what you do, you can do it longer!

3. Keep mentally occupied, like having a set of intervals to run which require you to look at your watch, compute times and paces, etc. Pretty soon before you know it, you're through the workout and the time goes by pretty quickly.

4. Music helps although I don't train or race with music generally, since it's not allowed at triathlons. I never run with music, although I do like music while on the bike trainer, but not while I'm out riding as it's dangerous and I can't hear cars coming.

5. Don't focus on pain. This never works for me. I just want to quit! If anything, I try to focus on perfect form, which tends to lessen or remove pain. I never try to get out of perfect form to lessen my pain, which could cause me to hurt somewhere else!

6. Focus on repetition and perfect form for every step. I try to keep aware of each step and try to make each step my perfect step. Get used to repeating for long periods of time.

7. Focus on distance goals, like running out to a point and then back, or saying I'm going to finish this loop. Then mentally you're committed and you will yourself not to quit and turnaround because you said you're going to run somewhere and then back.

8. Interesting terrain helps.

It's one of those things where you need to train this as much as the physical aspects. Most people can get physically capable of finishing a race of any distance; you just need to swim/bike/run the distances and you're pretty much physically there. But many people don't have the mental stamina to finish. This is the will that drives you to the finish line even if your body is screaming for you to quit.

Given all this, there are still some days when you just don't have it mentally. At this point, you should just go home because on some days you'll find you just won't be able to do the workout. But make sure you're quitting for the right reason and not just slacking because you're lazy.

If you're really into some of this stuff, I often use Biorhythms (http://bit.ly/6LV2P) to help give me some forewarning on days when I may not have the right physical or mental attitude for a hard workout. I will post more about this later, but it's an interesting way of looking at your body's energy and how to apply it to training.

I often get asked how I can race year after year and stay relatively injury free. They remark that I am 40+ years old and wonder how I can just keep doing this and get faster each time.

It took me 7 years of tinkering with my own body, trying a multitude of advice and training, even trying a bunch of technology from shoes to straps, before I figured out how to keep my body injury free.

Recently, someone tweeted about an article, The painful truth about trainers: Are running shoes a waste of money? from DailyMail, which really disappointed me. It disappointed me in the fact that we often try to simplify things and try to solve our problems with one thing. But it's not just about one thing, like running shoes as the article suggests, or even the lack of shoes which the article also suggests. Running involves a whole system of muscles, joints, bones, and coordination and how it works during running and over time. You need to address the whole system and not just one thing.

In answering the question of how I stay relatively injury free and race year after year at these long distance events, getting faster every time, I wanted to start with talking about what I have learned in what causes injury. In my next post, I will talk about what I did to address these causes of injury.

Now I will do something that I hate doing, which is to simplify (haha!). I will list a few basic things which I have found cause injury in runners:

Pounding

People talk about how the ground pounds the feet, legs, and body while running. Unfortunately, it's true. Every step you take puts shock back up into your body, and you have to absorb it somehow through your shoes, feet, legs, muscles, bones - whatever. Over time, exceeding the shock absorption qualities of your body relative to your running style will injure you. The object, then, is to reduce and minimize the shock that your body experiences. A combination of reducing the shock experienced AND increasing your body's ability to absorb shock will reduce the possibility of injury.

The Build Up of Tightness and Restrictions in Muscles

Muscles get tired and tight after training. It's natural. Restrictions and adhesions form because the muscle fibers tear during training and they get stronger through this process. Lactate by-products also cause tightness in the muscles and need to get flushed out - the faster they get flushed out, the faster your muscles will recover. Depending on your age and your fitness level, your muscles can loosen up in a few hours, or require days. The intensity of the effort will also affect the amount of tightness experienced and thus also the amount of time to recover.

I have also found that muscles tend to develop a tendency to form certain adhesions or tightness in the same spots until my body adapts to a new training stress. This has happened repeatedly over the course of an entire season; very annoying!

The problem with the buildup of tightness and restrictions is that if they are not removed, they can keep building and building, causing restricted motion and potential strain of the muscles. But there is a more dangerous effect: the tightness in your muscles can seriously reduce their ability to absorb shock, thereby transferring the shock from your muscles to the tendons and ligaments, or ultimately to cartilage and bone, which causes really bad things like fractures.

Cumulative Build-Up of Injury

Related to the previous is actual injury to your body and not letting it heal. You gut your way through pain thinking that is what will build you up, but in actuality you're just causing more and more injury. Finally, something really bad happens, like a tendon gives way, or a real muscle tear happens, or even a fracture.

Not Enough Recovery Time

A lot of people get really gung-ho about training. They raise the amount they do in trying to attain their goal, whether it's to lose a certain amount of weight, prepare for a race, or just get to a fitness level that is consistent with their training friends. They may have gotten a coach, who just delivers a plan that is more valid for young athletes or those that are experienced, but unfortunately may not be appropriate for them. The end result is that in the midst of training, athletes' bodies attempt to keep up but due to some factor(s), they are unable to recover fast enough given their training schedules. The result is a build up of injury and tired muscles which leads to injury.

Many training plans, or following the training plans of others, don't account for individual needs. Everybody has their own recovery time given certain factors and the best training plans account for this.

Failure to recognize one's own recovery needs is a common problem. It's often not clear exactly how much one's body needs, and sometimes not until you get injured. Factors that influence recovery time are:

1. Length and intensity of workouts
2. Age
3. Sleep, ie. did you get enough sleep?
4. Active recovery sessions and techniques
5. Fitness level, both past and present, ie. did you run track in high school or college, or were you sedentary all the way up to the point at which you started now?

Weak Supporting Muscles, Unbalanced Muscles

I never realized how many small muscles are used in supporting running until these muscles got sore during my training. In the past, I weight trained but the result focused on the big muscle groups and didn't really build up smaller supporting muscles. Also, being right handed, my right side was used more resulting in an even bigger imbalance between my two sides.

These small muscles are the ones that maintain your form perfectly stride over stride. If these muscles are weak, then over time they will tire and then your form will get sloppy. You subtly adjust your stride to compensate and then problems can occur when your big muscles are taking on the load of moving your body and balancing, not to mention overstraining those supporting muscles in the first place.

The way I discovered my inbalance was twofold. The first was on the Computrainer on the SpinScan where I could see as I pedaled, a graph of my power output. I was clearly dominating the power from my right side! The second way was through racing. Pushing hard through Vineman, my right hip and leg got really sore, tired, and started cramping while my left leg was tired, but relatively cramp free. It became obvious to me that I was just using my right leg more.

Using my right leg more also resulted in more problems for my left leg, showing strain in my calf and IT band, and quads, while my right leg exhibited less issues. It was an issue that has taken a long time to address, and it's still not fully solved.

Inconsistency in Training

In observing friends who train, I find there is a huge inconsistency in their training. They all say they go out and run, but when you ask them daily if they ran, you start to realize that they train only intermittently. Some weeks they'll run 3 times. The next week they run once. Then the week after they don't run at all. The week after that they'll run 2 times. And then it's two weeks of no running. And so on.

Consistency is key in training. Your body does not adapt to something by doing it occasionally. You need to do it regularly such that the body will recognize it needs to adapt to a new level of activity and stress and will do so accordingly.

If you are inconsistent, then you'll inevitably set yourself up for pain and injury as you'll constantly think that you can do more, but in actuality your body hasn't even adapted to what your mind thinks your body can do.

Bad Running Form

I watched my kid run and she has perfect running form. Great body lean forward, arms pumping, barely a thump on the ground for every step, floating on the balls of their feet.

Then we get older and something changes. We get heavier so it takes more effort to run. We don't run constantly enough any more and enjoy sitting in front of the TV or computer screen more than going out and running. We drive cars and take elevators. Our bodies forget how to run efficiently and either we go out for track and train during high school, or we spend those years in high school letting our bodies forget how to run well.

Go out and watch other people run. You'll see people leaning or hunched over. They swing their arms back and forth across their bodies. They pound down the pavement and you wince with every thump on the ground as you imagine the stress their bodies are absorbing. Some lean back while they run, resisting the pull of gravity backward as they try to move forward!

Bad form means body parts don't align when you run. You're putting stress not along the strongest muscles, but against the weaker muscles of the sides of your legs. If you're heel striking, you send the maximal shock up into your leg bones. If you wave your arms across your body, you're not taking advantage of the balancing movement that swinging arms forward and back brings. If you're hunched over, then you're adding stress to your shoulders and back and you can't move efficiently if you're all stiffened up!

All this leads to wasted effort and energy, and can lead to pulled/strained muscles because you're not relaxed and not running efficiently.

Doing Too Much Too Soon

Enthusiasm in runners is great. But many don't listen to their bodies and just do too much too soon. It is often hard to know exactly what our bodies can take before we try. But sometimes, we just exceed what our bodies can do or recover from and that's where injury occurs. We go for a marathon when we should have trained for a 10K and a half marathon first, and over a period of years.

Or, in our competitive zeal, we go out and try to become the fastest humans we can first time out and we get hurt because we didn't get our bodies up to adapting to the stresses yet.

Or we have someone driving us too hard, like an army sargeant coach, or friends who are more faster and experienced who egg you onwards when you go out and run with them. These are people who make you feel bad for going too slow, and you try to rise up to their challenge. Don't get me wrong; some people need this kind of motivation. But it's bad when you try and you don't listen to or know your body and you hurt yourself simply to save face.

Doing Something New

Related to doing too much too soon, doing something new that your body is not adapted to can also lead to injury. Suppose you've never run before. Then your friends tell you it's great and they run, and they want you to go out and run with them. So you do it. Then after a few times, your legs are aching. Now why is that?

Probably because in your desire to keep up with your friends, you go out and try to keep up with people who are used to running more than you. Then your body protests because you're trying to do something that your body is not used to. If you continue to gut your way through it, you might make it to adapting, or you might go downward into injury.

My Painful Path to Ironman

On my path to Ironman, I chose to start with an Olympic triathlon first, working with Team in Training. Then I raced a half ironman, swam the Waikiki Rough Water Swim (2.5 miles), and also ran the NYC Marathon. I did each stage of the full ironman before I did the full thing. But still, it was too much too soon.

Before my first Olympic tri, I had not done any running at all. I cycled intermittently and didn't really know how to swim. My body was not damaged from a previous injury thankfully, but my lack of a history of athletic pursuits, and adding in my age of 37, and the fact that my body adapts to physical stress at a certain rate, all meant that as I built up towards my first triathlon, my body was just not able to keep up.

I was constantly getting too tight and stretching could not alleviate the tightness. I tried to keep up with my Team in Training buddies on the training schedule but that was even too much for me. I kept getting sore legs and my IT bands were really sore. My knees were also getting sore from all the tightness in the surrounding muscles and the shock of my poor heel striking running form. I just thought that I would follow the plan and everything would be all right. It was definitely not, but I did make it through my first triathlon although I thought it really sucked.

After this episode, I resolved to figure this whole thing out. I tried everything and read up on everything I could get my hands on. I found out that most doctors don't know anything about running. I found out that a lot of research has been done, but a lot of it has turned out to be false. I tried technology and that worked sometimes but not all the time. I went for another 2 years of training, gutting through my first half ironman and other Olympic triathlons until 2004 when I left my company and could spend a lot more time trying to figure this out and how to remove all these nagging aches and pains that I experienced.

The journey I went on to solve all this is my next blog post - stay tuned!

I just read this off of the Total Immersion blog and had to comment immediately:

How long can you sustain Fast Swimming?

I found it to be extremely interesting in its discussion on adaptation and about neurological training. He states regarding adaptation:

These days, the coaches of elite swimmers are far more likely to give a moderate training load, let the swimmer adapt to it, then give a slightly more demanding load, adapt to that, etc. Rather than one major peak per season, they're looking to produce a prolonged series of carefully-calibrated smaller advances in capacity and performance.

I've always thought that shocking the system as in the past was only going to wear somebody down and I've adjusted my own training to reflect an approach that is very similar to what he describes. I up my training load, then spend about 3 weeks to cement that adaptation into my system before raising it again.

The other important point is here:

The seldom-acknowledged weakness in this approach is that, while it may work reasonably well for the metabolic systems (aerobic capacity, muscle strength, etc.), neurological capacity was poorly served. A swimmer who is barely surviving workouts, because of prolonged intensity or volume, is far more likely to "practice struggle" in their movements, hurting the neuromuscular imprint needed to swim fast.

Lately, I've really come to realize the importance of neurological training. This is not only practicing and imprinting proper form in swimming, but also in the way my legs move in running, and also getting my nerves to fire faster so that my legs are more comfortable in cycling fast, even when tired.

Driving your system to exhaustion so that you can't even focus on form is just dumb. I've discovered this as well where I would get to a point of tiredness and can't even maintain form while running. The result is that I start stomping more, heel striking, my legs start moving slower and slower: this is all bad not only for racing fast, but increasing the likelihood of injury.

This is why I am mentally extra focused on maintaining form in all 3 sports. It's super important to practice this, especially when you get into tired states because the body just gets lazy as you focus on "keep moving" versus proper form. The worst thing that can happen, as the TI blog entry suggests, is that when you get tired, you start imprinting improper form or you never gain the ability to imprint proper form because you're always tired and you can't.

Love this blog entry and love how it validates some of my own personal discoveries.

Oops forgot one.

Kinesio Tape

If you put this tape on correctly, it's great for making my muscles relax and not contract. It's also got tissue lifting properties which enable more blood flow into muscles despite the fact that they're tight. It's amazing stuff.

These last few years I've been thinking about proper recovery in between workouts a lot, and how it affects my ability to increase my performance. A lot has been written about recovery and how improper recovery can really detract from a race result and lead to injury. As I have explored recovery, not much has been written about some of the other aids to recovery that can speed it up.

Recovery really became important for me as I discovered that, at 40+ years of age, I would require up to 3 days of recovery after my long bike and long run days. Conventional training wisdom states that 1 full day of rest would be enough, and that by the day after I'd be able to hit workouts at normal paces and wattages with no problem. This wasn't the case for me!

The other piece of wisdom that people fear is that you need at least 3 workout days for each sport to improve in triathlon. I've also found this to be false as I increase my long run and bike days, I still improve with only 2 days per week per discipline (not counting recovery workouts in those disciplines). But this is under specific conditions as I would love to move to 3 strong days during my build and peaking phases and not just during the base phase. Those conditions are the fact that I'm 40+ years of age and I don't recover fast enough, that I never was an athlete in my youth so I can't draw upon early years of athletic conditioning and ability, and also because I started so late to build my body and we just don't build strength as fast as we do when we're younger.

So if you don't match those conditions, you should still go for 3 good workouts per discipline per week to try to improve and not just move to 2 simply because you're lazy.

One of my aims became finding ways of recovering faster from my long bike and run days. I've also discovered recovery happens in the aerobic system, the muscles in both healing tissue damage and relieving tightness, and there is mental recovery as well. There have been many instances when recovery has happened separately in these areas and not all at once. For example, I may feel good in my lungs and body, which is a sign that my aerobic system has recovered, but my legs still feel tired and tight, which is a sign that my leg muscles have not.

Mental recovery is when you brain needs time to recover from mentally focusing on a long ride or intense training session. Doing hard workouts over and over can fatigue your ability to want to sustain a long and/or intense workout and sometimes you just need a brain break so you can hit the next workout with proper determination and not weakened willpower.

With respect to muscle tightness, many researchers are now working on the neurological basis for recovery, which is to figure out how to get the nerves to stop firing and to let go, which reduces or eliminates muscle tightness. This is tightness that you can't stretch away; it stays around despite stretching. This tightness is also very dangerous in that if you don't remove it, over time this will transfer shock and stress to the ligaments and joints which don't absorb that very well and cause further damage to your body, leading to injury. Muscle tightness also prevents the transport of blood flow to your muscles, so exercise by-products stay around longer (hence soreness), and hinder the flow of nutrients back into your muscles for healing and energy replenishment.

In the last few years, the techniques and devices for recovering have become more sophisticated. While this survey is by no means exhaustive, I will talk about some of the ones I've encountered and have used here now:

Time and Rest

The easiest and cheapest way to recover. You just don't do anything until your body comes back, besides sleeping, resting, taking lots of vitamins, and eating properly. My issue, of course, that just sitting around isn't good training practice for the 3 days I need, even if it does work.

Ice Baths

This is one of my favorites. Immediately after my long bike or run, I jump into the bathtub and fill it with water and ice cubes and sit in it for about 10 minutes. The ice stops the muscles from creating more exercise by-products and also numbs any pain from training. Then when I get out, I hop into the shower and the hot water restarts blood flow and helps flush any remaining exercise by-products from your muscles.

The one downside is getting enough ice to do this. I need probably around 15 lbs in the summer time when the cold water coming out of the faucet is warmer, but only 9 lbs in the winter time. So either you gotta run to the supermarket after training to buy some bags of ice, or you have to fill up plastic bags with ice cubes during the week.

Compression Clothing

I love wearing compression socks and tights. I do find that these are very effective at helping fluid move through my legs and increase circulation, while reducing that swollen feeling when fluid pools in my legs.

Massage

I did do this once or twice but I don't do it very often. Massage on tired muscles does help blood flow through those areas, creating recovery. It also feels good having someone loosen them up in the process. But it is expensive and I don't find many massage practictioners do the right thing on the muscles as there are many forms of massage and not all work well on specific muscle recovery.

Active Recovery

This is a great way to increase blood flow and loosen up tight muscles. You just do very light workouts in any discipline. While just going out for a light swim, bike, or jog is good, I also think you can train while practicing active recovery so you're actually getting some benefits beyond recovering. I am a big proponent of neuromuscular training, so active recovery sessions are a great way to train the neuromuscular system while not stressing your overall physical system. This is doing track drills while out jogging, or doing one legged spinning drills and practicing perfect form during fast spinning on the bike, or doing swimming drills. I also find that stimulating the muscles to fire fast again after getting all stiff and tired from a hard training session is crucial to making sure you don't slow down, so I like to do fast turnover running/swimming and fast pedaling to get my muscles back to firing fast again.

Physical Therapy, ART, Graston

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big proponent of weekly physical therapy sessions with ART and Graston to help remove tightness and smooth out muscle adhesions to get the muscles functional and loose again. I have found nothing better to get my muscles prepped for another week of hard training than ART and Graston.

Foam Rolling, TP Massage Rollers and Balls, Lacrosse Balls, Softballs

Another form of massage is using these tools to help get into muscles and knead out tightness and soreness, as well as promote blood flow to those areas. Foam rollers are great for overall massaging and can be used for warmup as well. TP Massage Rollers from Trigger Point Performance are excellent for deeper massaging of muscles, as foam rollers can be too broad in surface area and too soft to really get deeper into muscles. TP Massage Balls and lacrosse balls are even better to get into specific points in muscles. Sometimes I also use a softball to massage my quads and to get into my psoas. The idea is to press hard into those tools and move the tool or the muscle underneath to help smooth out adhesions and make the muscle functional again.

Port-a-Vibe and Vibration in Recovery

Newest in my collection of toys, I bought a Port-a-Vibe which is a consumer version of some of those larger much more expensive vibration units you find in big gyms. Researchers have found that vibration stimulates the nervous system, increases metabolic rates, and promotes circulation. I stand on this unit for 10 minutes and it's great for increasing circulation to my muscles and help with recovery. I have also used it to warmup. Many other benefits are cited, like working out while standing on the unit has shown to increase muscle stimulation and performance enhancements occur.

Deep Muscle Stimulator (DMS)

This gizmo has been around for a long time. The Deep Muscle Stimulator (DMS) is a heavy duty unit weighing about 5 lbs and vibrates at a certain frequency found to be optimal in affecting muscles neurologically. Specifically, when you direct the gun-like unit to your muscles, it pummels the muscle until the muscle's nerves can't keep up their firing, hence tightness, and the nerves just tire and relax. Not only does it do that, but it also has normal massage benefits like stimulating circulation to the applied area. I am lusting after one of these, but it costs $2500!!! My PT guy uses one on me and I love it.

Normatec MVP

Check these out - Normatech Sports originally created these out of a need for patients with medical conditions involving poor circulation, or healing after surgery. After giving some units to sports teams, they started using these for recovery and have found some fantastic results. The booties work by using air to create a pumping action against your legs (there are booties for your arms too) that increase circulation. This accelerates the movement of exercise by-products out of your legs and brings in new blood faster. Athletes use these for 20-30 minutes and have apparently achieved amazing results. The Garmin cycling team have used these and they love them. I am also lusting after a pair of these - they require a doctor's prescription and they cost $5000 a pair! Sometime next year, they intend to create a more consumer version which will cost somewhere between $1000-2000 a pair. Not sure I can wait that long...also the consumer version has less control over the frequency of the pumping against the legs.

Technology is advancing by leaps and bounds. It's all we can do to keep up with these advances, but us crazy athletes who want to get faster can only continue to lust after these fantastic techniques and devices.

Yesterday I went out in 50 degree cloudy weather to go do some climbing laps on Kings Mountain and Old La Honda. I did not anticipate the temperature drop on top of the mountain, which combined with the wind chill factor did me in.

Clearly I did not dress correctly. My exposed finger gloves and half covers for my shoes weren't enough to prevent near frostbite on them as I zoomed down Kings after my first climb. I think the wind chill was in the high 30s and my body was starting to really shut down. I considered going to Old La Honda and doing that once but it was too much. I went for the fastest way home as I felt like my body just couldn't give anymore and didn't want a total shutdown out on the road.

I made it home and stood in a hot shower for many minutes to get warm.

Suck.

I hate training in cold. I'm already of low body fat such that low temps are just uncomfortable. Keeping warm during cold day workouts just saps me of extra energy keeping warm. It also increases the risk of getting sick too. I remember forcing myself to go out for 6 hour rides back in late 2004 to prep for my first Ironman NZ. I got sick a few times but also during those cold rides I never felt like I never could really push hard because so much energy was used to keep warm.

Time to watch the weather better and just wimp out more and enjoy longer focused interval rides on my Computrainer.

I just went to my physical therapist and he turned me on to some tools made out of plastic, which were very much like metal Graston tools but much thinner. I doubted that they could hold up to the abuse of scraping my muscles, but after a treatment session, they seemed to hold up fine. They also exhibit another vibratory quality than thick stainless steel; you can feel and hear the vibrations of the adhesions and bumps within muscles much better (so thick stainless steel better than a spoon, but plastic better than either).

These are the tools of Gua Sha, whose roots are in China now in the US. In China, these tools are often made of jade, or bone, or animal horn. When I first mentioned Graston to my mother years ago, she told me that the Chinese had been doing this kind of treatment for a long time, probably longer than Graston has been around.

Gua Sha stands for "scraping sand" and that's what you do with the tools, which is to scrape your muscles. The principles are the same as Graston although the explanations are often in Eastern concepts, using qi and energy meridians and flow. My PT person told me that he went to a seminar and the teacher who is a Westerner had also incorporated a lot of other concepts, like the concept of Anatomy Trains where muscles are linked together around the body and often treating the entire muscle chain is much better than treating just the local affected area.

Gua Sha scraping can be light up to super deep, resulting in a bruised appearance lasting many days. My PT person and I talked about this and we both feel that extensive bruising resulting from super deep scraping is bad for people in-season. I've often felt the results of deep Graston the next day when my muscles are too traumatized to perform well, even as they are healing.

For a more in-depth discussion on Gua Sha and its usage, pick up this excellent book from the Gua Sha Tools website. It's packed with lots of detailed information, and crosses from Eastern and Western philosophies.

I did want to mention that I found a Graston tool substitute that was better than my spoon. A few weeks back I searched the internet looking for, perhaps, a set of used Graston tools on ebay or elsewhere. Amazingly, I could not find one instance of a used set anywhere! But after much searching, I found the STARR Tool. The website is a bit ghetto as far as design goes, and with anxiety I pressed the Buy link to purchase the STARR tool. Thankfully, it arrived a few days later!

The stainless steel STARR tool is excellent. The steel transmits the vibrations much better than a metal spoon I was using and it has multiple edges to be used on various parts of the body. Its heft really allows me to get into muscles deeper too. It also comes with a CD that goes over the basics of scraping technique.

While I admire Graston very much, I also like the fact that people are getting alternatives out there, especially for an adventurous soul such as myself who dares treat my own ailments. I can't get into my PT person's office all that often, and between visits, I bust out my trusty STARR tool and help my body along in its healing and recovery process.

I did buy a set of Gua Sha plastic and jade tools, so once I get them I'll do a post on how they feel relative to my STARR tool and Graston as well.

In my interactions with my coach M2, I have learned that there are 6 types of training. These are:

1. Neuro-muscular - training of the nervous system to do something either differently, better, or to some form which maximizes efficiency and minimizes effort. Example: super short high speed treadmill intervals for 15-30 seconds per interval, form focus workouts for swimming.

2. Speed - training that results in being faster. Examples: swimming speed sets, sprinting track workouts for running.

3. Strength - training that results in you being stronger, and to put out more energy at the same effort. Examples: hill climbing in running, hill climbing or more watts on the computrainer in cycling.

4. Endurance - training for the ability to race or produce energy output for some length of time. Example: gradually lengthening the duration of a long run over a period of weeks.

4b. Stamina - I make this a sub-section to endurance, which is the ability to maintain a level of speed/strength for a long period of time. Example: gradually increasing the time of your intervals and reducing your rest periods while maintaining the same wattages during Computrainer bike interval workouts.

5. Recovery - stimulation of blood flow by raising heart rate and circulation but not raising effort to flush the body of exercise by-products and promote healing. Example: cycling on a computrainer at negligible watts, but high RPMs for about 20-30min.

It is somewhat obvious that whenever you go out to train, you're most likely training more than one of these areas simultaneously. However, I wanted to point out:

1. You can train to focus on only one of these areas.

2. It's good to have a mix of all 6 areas as you're building for a race. The mix depends on where you are in your training schedule.

3. You have to be aware that potentially you could be detracting other areas if you're not focusing on these areas.

Let's talk about the first point.

Focusing on one thing is possible and many times desirable. Of the 6 training types, I've focused on mostly neuro-muscular, strength, and recovery. It's all based on what you individually need.

For example, over the winter, I did a lot of treadmill training where I'd warmup with track drills, ie. kick backs, skipping, and then started doing 30 min intervals at super high speed, building from 6 MPH to as much as 11 MPH (where the interval drops to 15-20 seconds due to the fact that the treadmill takes too long to accelerate to that speed). By the way, I have not found a gym treadmill that goes faster than 11 MPH, although I have heard that you can actually get treadmills that go that fast. What this achieved for me, is not necessarily the ability to maintain an 11 MPH/5:27 min/mile pace over a race. It does help train my neuromuscular system to fire my muscles quicker so that I get used to running at a higher turnover rate, at paces I can maintain. This results in me being faster simply because my body is accustomed to moving my legs faster.

For strength training, over the last 2 years I started climbing and doing laps on Old La Honda and Kings Mountain. These laps have built up my leg strength considerably and increased their resilience on hill climbs, where I was defeated utterly at Ironman Austria a few years back.

I am also a big user of recovery workouts. I figure out if, for a given workout, I need to back off. If I do need to back off severely, often I'll do a recovery workout. An example of this is a pedaling efficiency workout involving a lot of high RPM one-legged pedaling drills at minimal wattage. It doesn't stress my muscles from a power standpoint, but it raises my heart rate and circulation so that blood is flowing through my muscles and the flushing effect helps my recovery so that the next day I'll be able to perform a normal workout.

Second point: The mix.

Training all in one type means that you're not gaining the full benefits or reaching your potential for a race. If all you're doing is sprinting workouts on the bike, you may not be able to last an entire century. If all you're doing is running at endurance pace every workout, you may find that you aren't increasing your speed, or you don't have enough strength to pass someone when you want to.

You need to mix it up and include all types and improve on them all. You can figure out, as I have, where my deficiencies are, and do some focus on improving some areas. But overall, you need to train all 6 types as you build through your season to the big race.

I tend to focus on neuromuscular workouts during the offseason, as they don't stress my aerobic system and are great for recovery workouts. Then I move from neuromuscular focus as my training season starts to building speed and strength with a lesser endurance emphasis. This is because endurance is easiest to build, but speed and strength take lot more time. As I hit mid-season, I am adding more endurance and stamina into the mix as I try to extend the speed and strength I've built up to longer times.

Third point, watch out for what you're not focusing on and don't let it slide.

As you're focusing on certain aspects of training, you have to watch out that you don't reduce other aspects. An easy example is that as you build endurance, you may find that your form (neuromuscular aspect) gets really messy as you get tired. This is very bad! The trick is to maintain form even when you're butt tired, and as you focus on building endurance. Otherwise, you could injure yourself through poor form, as your muscles are tiring and you engage other weaker muscles to compensate.

Another example is when you're supposed to be doing a recovery workout, but yet you feel energized and so you try to push harder and do something with more energy. But then all of a sudden, half way through the workout, you find that you burn through that initial burst of energy which fails you later because you weren't fully recovered and you don't have enough stamina to continue. Recovery when you have to and don't force yourself to do something your body just isn't OK for.

Yet another example is not gradually increasing your workout intervals to improve stamina. You mentally don't feel like doing fast intervals beyond a certain point, and thus your stamina never improves. You hit race day and you find that as you try to maintain speed, you can't and you're slowing down as you move through the miles.

While training typically involves the simultaneous training of all 6 types of training, I think that there is a lot of benefit to identifying where your personal needs are, and coupled with where you are in your training season, you can focus on specific areas which need improvement and advance them greatly. Categorizing the different types of training really helps in thinking about training and how to race faster.

When I used to weight lift a lot, one of the things that I learned which was really important was when to back off during training, or just not train completely. You basically had to be able to distinguish between when you were just a little tired but you still could work out, and when you really shouldn't work out like when you're injured or sick or burnt out, etc. You also have to figure out when your brain is just being lazy and you can workout, even if you don't feel like it.

Backing off during training can be a hard thing. We're all hard charging athletes and we always want to give it our all for every workout. We follow what our coaches give us and if we don't follow their plan exactly, then we get an anxiety attack and feel like we'll never finish our goal race. If we miss workouts, we feel like we're not gonna make it.

The reality is that you can have what I call "backing off" at the macro and micro level and still be fine for the race. Macro level is when you get sick or injured, and you have to take off multiple days (maybe weeks) to get better before you can go back to training. Micro level is when you either have to skip one workout due to some factor that will resolve itself within a day, like not being recovered enough from the day before, or extra soreness, or low energy levels. Whether you can have a great race depends on so many factors and not just if you miss a workout or two, or even for a week or more. Generally, backing off at the micro level, ie. taking a day off, skipping a workout, reducing pace/watts, etc, doesn't have much effect if it happens temporarily. Backing off at the macro level for too long, ie. being sick for a month, taking weeks to heal a pulled muscle, being lazy on workouts for many weeks, etc., will definitely affect performance.

So don't worry about it so much! Back off because you should and don't stress about it. But do pay attention when you back off for a long period of time.

How do you tell when to back off? It took me a while to figure out how to tell when I should back off and how much. Here are some things I learned:

1. If I'm sick, then of course I should not train.

1a. But figuring out when I can start training again after being sick can be tough. When I finally feel physically a bit more energetic, I usually start with recovery workouts to get the body readjusted to training again, before leaping into full bore training. I try to keep workouts short, like 15-30 minutes, and not overstress my system until I'm 100% back.

2. I have tried to fine tune my sensitivity to my physical condition. This is intuition, and knowing how your body responds to stress and how fast it recovers, and a sensitivity to the condition of your muscles and overall system. Only experience can tell you what your body needs on that day. So keep alert and a log if it helps, and get to know your body as much as possible.

3. I find that the five key things to keep track of are your heart, lungs, muscles, energy level, and brain. Warning signs are when my heart rate is a bit high, or my lungs feel stretched still from an intense workout the day before (I usually feel what can be described as a "cool" sensation in the middle of my chest), or my muscles are sore or tight. Or sometimes my brain just doesn't seem to have the same willpower as it may have on another day. Or my energy level is low and I feel tired. These all tell me that I need to be more mindful and potentially may need to adjust my workout to fit.

4. The easiest days are when I approach my workout and feel mentally fresh and my body feels energetic. The other easiest days are when my body is overly sore and I feel mentally and physically tired: an obvious sign that I should take a day off. The toughest are days when I am right about to workout and am on the edge of feeling not all that energetic and maybe I'm not fully mentally psyched for working out. But through experience, I know that often when I start the workout, my energy comes back to me when I start.

On days like this, I usually don't worry about being lazy - it's not really in my nature nowadays and I always look forward to working out. But I don't know exactly what I can accomplish during the workout, and am not sure whether I can push the limits or just do a recovery workout, or somewhere in between. So I usually am prepared to adjust my workout midstream to what I can handle at that moment.

I find that it is during the warmup that I can figure out most of the time what awaits me in the rest of the workout. As I warm up, I approach my goal workout speeds (swim or run) and/or wattages (for bike workouts) and see how my body responds. If I am feeling like my exertion level is too high and unsustainable, then I know I'll have to lower paces or wattages during the main set or else I will flame out before the workout ends. If I feel good, then I will be OK for the goal paces/watts.

Another potential factor: sometimes if I approach a workout feeling a bit tired, I can bring my workout up to goal paces/watts simply by having a longer warmup. By getting my blood flowing slowly with more time, I am able to get my system moving and potentially still hit my goal paces/watts.

5. If I make it past the warmup, then I may adjust again during the workout if something is not right. This can be a perceived exertion that is rising too fast for me to make it through the workout. It can also be a sapping of willpower that could evaporate if I am powering through some really fast paces or watts and trying to hold them for long intervals.

6. One macro level adjustment I have made was my recovery in general. By doing so many intense weekend rides doing Old La Honda and Kings Mountain climbs, along with a 2-3 hour run, I have found that I actually need another 2-3 days of recovery. Just taking one day off is not enough; I will do recovery workouts for 2 days after and then I'm fine on the 3rd day for a normal pace/watts workout. I know this because I have tried to sustain paces/watts after one day and my exertion and heart rate leap in the first few intervals.

Instead of fighting this, I just merely added it into my workout regime and it has not affected my race times at all; I'm still getting PR times race after race. It's almost unintuitive that you could rest more but still yet race faster! I chalk it up to my age, my fitness level, and what I need to do to race faster.

The important thing to note is that we're all different as humans. We all come from different fitness backgrounds and levels, and that coupled with our age and genetics means we can train a certain way. We need to develop a sensitivity for what our individual bodies need, and not stress about how others are training. I am a big believer in individualized training and I think this is where a lot of generic plans and group training can harm people. Developing an awareness of how our bodies work, and coupling that with a good coach (who won't train you like you're in the army and/or shame you into doing senseless workouts), will work wonders for your race performance.

So take a day off if you really need it or back off on the paces and watts - don't stress about it and you'll still race fine come race day.

A friend and I were IMing one night about her muscles cramping up. I thought that it would be interesting to write a post about it, since in my early triathlon career, I suffered from cramping in the most inopportune times during races.

I read an article in one of the popular triathlon magazines that talked about the causes of cramps and what can help prevent them. It actually showed some evidence that electrolyte supplementation didn't help prevent cramps. Then there are all the medical research into what happens within muscles to create these painful situation. Of course, each coach and athlete has their own formula for preventing and managing muscle cramps.

In this post, I'm gonna skip all the scientific stuff and talk about my own discoveries. Note that everyone is different, and I think that applying a systematic way of figuring out why you cramp and what can prevent it can be your formula for success.

What causes cramps?

What I've found causes cramps are:

1. Electrolyte depletion. I sweat buckets in general and that just causes electrolytes to flow out of my body. This increases during warmer days, and seems to be less of an issue during cooler days. During races, I always build up this layer of grit on my skin, which is just the salt buildup from sweating so much and for such a long time. Thus if you don't replace electrolytes, you're more likely to cramp. So those who get dehydrated during races are really susceptible to cramping.

2. Over-contraction of muscles, especially muscles that are already tired and/or tight. My classic example of this is trying to stretch tight quads during a race. You reach down to grab your ankle and pull your leg back towards your butt. But since your hamstrings are also tired, they seize up in a cramp while trying to stretch your quads! Needless to say I NEVER stretch my quads now during a race. Another example is when I swam last week, and for some reason my plantar fascia was very tight. Then I shoved that foot into a fin and swam a long set with fins. The plastic boot on the fin was snug, but it also squeezed down on my foot so much while I was kicking that it caused my whole foot to cramp up. Not fun.

3. The muscles just get overtaxed and overworked, and thus cramp in protest, despite your mind willing the body to do more. This has happened to me early in my triathlon career at half and full Iron distance races. I have found two instances why this happens. The first is due to simple pushing of my body, typically my legs, and then towards the end of my race I cramp up because they are tired and I'm trying to either go faster, or go up a hill, etc. The second has to do with imbalances in my body. I have found that I naturally exert more of my right leg because it's stronger than my left. This tires out my right leg more so than my left, and thus it can cramp up whereas my left is still OK.

What can prevent muscle cramps?

1. Electrolyte supplementation. Depending on how your body is, it could be that all you need is to drink Gatorade instead of water, or you may need take electrolyte tablets several times an hour plus electrolytes in sports drink and gels (like me). It varies widely between individuals and also in race conditions. I've been able to back off on electrolyte tablets during races with cool conditions successfully.

2. Get stronger. I would say that along with 1, this is the other really important measure for preventing muscle cramps. By really focusing on getting stronger during training, I have found that this has been the other major factor in preventing my muscles from getting to a potentially cramped state. So lots of hill repeats, and practicing accelerating up hills, for both running and biking. This also applies to interval work, especially on the bike, to extend the duration of maintaining watts while pedaling.

3. Kinesio tape. The curative/supportive properties of this tape are amazing. By taping from insertion to origin, you provide a slight tug to muscles in the "resting direction", which helps muscles to relax and reduce the possibility of cramping.

4. Sportlegs pills. This amazing supplement helps minimize the production of lactate and exercise by-products in the muscles. When there is no "burn" in my muscles, it helps them stay relaxed even when tired and/or when I push hard. By not having exercise by-products in my muscles, they stay less tight and less susceptible to cramping.

5. Heat acclimatization. Adapting your body to function at high effort in hot weather helps your body figure out how to function under those conditions and not cramp, or just plain collapse. It learns how to sweat and to deliver energy and oxygen to muscles during hot weather, which is critical if you're going to race during super hot days.

To discover what worked for me, I started experimenting. I didn't do any kind of special blood testing. Suffice to say, it took a while to figure out what would work and what wouldn't.

I started by upping my electrolyte intake during races and found that I got up to 3 Saltstick caps per hour, plus 2 scoops of Endurolyte powder in every tall water bottle, plus a scoop of First Endurance EFS. I also take a Powergel every 45 minutes, with its own set of extra electrolytes. I also take 3 Sportlegs capsules every 3 hours, and it's amazing how I can push hard and barely feel any burn, but only just a general tiredness in those muscles. This works for me and keeps me going during races.

But I didn't feel good about taking all that extra stuff, even during training. So then I made sure I got my body more adapted to the high stress of racing. I made sure I did negative split training on every long run, or would descend during loops up to 3+ hours. I did up to 4 laps up Kings Mountain and Old La Honda, which just toughened my legs to biking at continuous hard effort for long periods of time.

Then I also started running mid-afternoon, when temps were highest. I ran 3+ hours in 90+ degrees for many weeks. It was tough at first, but quickly got easier until I was able to run and do negative splits and descends.

It worked wonders for getting me through races both faster and cramp free.

A bit unscientific, and a collaboration of many different things I've read about or been told about. But I can't argue with the results either.

I just watched the instructional DVD, Clinical Kinesio Taping and finally got some of the finer points of Kinesio taping technique. Here they are:

1. Taping from origin to insertion is supportive and enhances muscle activity. So you tape this way when there isn't necessarily injury, but you want to help achieve peak performance with maximum support.

2. Taping from insertion to origin is curative and helps in recovery, and reducing muscle tightness and spasms.

3. Putting the muscle in flexion, or stretching it, and then laying the tape down helps enhance the tape's "lifting" effect on the fascia. When muscles under the fascia are tight, they swell and push against the fascia, reducing fluid and blood flow which is essential for recovery, removing activity by-products, and getting fresh oxygen and nutrients to the affected area.

Amazing stuff this tape!

Yesterday I went to see my physical therapist. The week before, I had somehow pulled and/or spasmed my left back, ranging from the top trapezoids/neck down the middle back and into the lat area. It was during weight lifting that this happened and it was very annoying and painful for a long while.

The result of this was to then cause a kinetic chain domino effect. Those muscles are linked from the left side down into my right glutes, and down my right hamstring and so on. In the short few days that my left back was affected, it also caused my right lower back and glutes to tighten up, as well as down into tightening up my hamstring. This all manifested itself as a shorter right leg.

When I got to my physical therapist, he checked my leg length and all this tightening was enough to pull my right leg up by almost 1/4" shorter than my left!

In the old days, physical therapists might prescribe an orthotic with a small lift in the heel to take up the room left by the shortening of my leg. However, I now perceive this as a crutch and not a permanent solution. In fact, I have a propensity for a shorter right leg, as its muscles tighten up and pull it up. But I have also found that through physical therapies, corrective exercise, and proper technique will actually remove the issue. Thus, having an artificial lift in my right leg, which was to correct for a condition, was now annoying a now normal condition of two corrected even legs! Needless to say, I scraped off the wedge and now have two relatively even legs....except when special conditions occur like my spasming left back.

Now I know that I have to keep special watch on muscle tightening of any sort, and also be wary of its effect on the kinetic chain of muscles in which it lies. It's why I go to physical therapy every week to have ART and Graston specialists work over my tight spots and make sure that my body is balanced and even, and that nothing is pulling too much. Otherwise, leaving a condition like that untreated would result in further injuries further up and down this kinetic chain.

After experiencing this, I am now a firm believer that this is a major cause of injury in many runners, where muscles start getting tight and they are not given time to loosen up, and the kinetic chain starts tightening which eventually leads to injury. It's too bad that more people do not have the time or resources, or even the desire to go more to a good physical therapist; I think it's one of the reasons why I can keep running and racing faster and for longer distances without getting injured.

For way too detailed information about kinetic chains, check out Anatomy Trains.

For IM FL, I raced with compression sleeves for my lower legs by Zensah. I really like these for their compressive design, which is a ribbed, graduated compression that reduces up the lower leg. I also like sleeves as opposed to full socks as I prefer to wear my favorite socks for racing instead of potentially not liking the foot part of a full compression sock.

In retrospect, it was kind of dumb for me not to train with them. My ART doctor reminded me of this and it kind of slipped my mind that it would be one of those rare times I was going to try something new on the race and not before! In general, BAD IDEA. Thinking back, something bad could have happened, like the compression could have cut off too much circulation to my lower leg and caused numbness in my feet. Or they could have rubbed somewhere and chafed, or just been too uncomfortable.

I also had a decision to make. I was not sure if I should wear them on the bike, or put them on at T2 for the run. In seeing some races, I did see people wearing them on the run for sure. Certainly I have seen pro marathoners wear them. But I did not recall seeing anyone wearing them on the bike. So I decided that for this race I would put them on at T2 and use them only for the run. The next race I may try them for the bike and wear them through the run.

Hitting T2, I put on those sleeves and went out for the marathon part of the race. It's hard to tell whether or not they really helped or not. This year, I trained more at the 3 hour/18 mile run level to increase my tolerance for running at speed at that time and distance. The course was totally flat the whole way, so no hills to tax my legs that way. The weather was very moderate, and the course with lots of shade so no super hot day to ruin my ability to sustain a pace or increase chances of cramping.

What I did notice, taking all these into consideration plus my compression sleeves, was that I was able to maintain a constant stride all the way through to mile 20. Post mile 20, I was still able to maintain stride although I was slowing down more. My fascia did not tighten up around my legs or knees and they remained nicely loose the whole way. Mentally, I did feel a bit tired and did more walking through aid stations. So I may have maintained pace between aid stations, but adding in more walking time through aid stations slowed my average pace.

Then my surprise at hitting mile 24 instead of mile 23 (brain fart for not noticing the mile 23 sign before then) and being able to accelerate at that point to the finish meant that I still had energy to do that even after 24 miles of running.

It's inconclusive to say that compression sleeves were the sole cause that enabled me to run better, but I think that they helped. Certainly there were no negative effects. As I always say, "that which does not kill me, can't hurt and probably makes me faster."

I'll have to think on whether or not I want to train with them. One part of me doesn't like to use them as a crutch, but the other part of me tells me that I can have more good workouts and really push harder with less fatigue, and feeling less wiped out at the end of a long run or bike. Something to try next year.

I also wore 2XU Compression Tights post-race for recovery. I wore a size small and there were tight portions on my legs, but some parts like my thighs felt not as tight. 2XU uses circular/spiral bands of thread to create a graduated compression up the legs. However, I don't think they work as well as they should even though I sized down a size and they were tight to put on. But I did wear them all day the day after, and slept in them. I think they did help me recover as my legs felt very fresh and my hips didn't feel restricted after the race. I could tell by comparing my walking to others post-race and many others were definitely very stiff looking whereas I was much looser.

On the plane ride back, I wore my Zensah lower leg sleeves which always help on plane rides.

Yesterday I went to a local running store and bought a pair of Skins Sport Compression Tights. These use a different weave to achieve their graduated compression. I put them on and they felt better than the 2XUs. I had more compression all the way up my leg, instead of feeling like the compression disappeared up on my thighs. I think I will use these from now on for recovery.

I am also considering trying the Skins Sport Long Sleeve and Skins Sport Arm Sleeves next year at IM CDA. I wonder how full body compression affects my performance during race.

For some great information on compression, check out the Skins website for How Skins Work.

Remember when you were a kid and you got hurt or sick, and you just went to your family doctor and that guy seemed to be able to see you whenever you were hurt or sick, and just about knew exactly what to do no matter what happened to you? I do.

I thought all doctors were supposed to help you and to be able to see you whenever you needed them. I thought they had all this magical knowledge about health and could cure just about anything.

Then something changed. I moved to California and found things were very different. Just about every doctor was so booked up that I couldn't even get to see them when I needed them. Many were also all about the money and I felt like they wanted me to keep coming back even after I was cured, just so they could bill the insurance company for yet another visit. Or worse: they made the wrong diagnosis on some problems I had, or just had the worst bedside manners I had ever seen. Also, I had never exerpeinced such arrogance in doctors as I have seen in California...! Doctors in my new place of residence didn't know everything, and I grew to be distrustful of doctors' diagnoses. I had to develop my own method of carefully choosing doctors that I knew were able to help me in certain areas.

Over the last decade, I had to try out, pick, and choose carefully doctors in the area of sports training and recovery. It was not an easy process; in my early days of training, I would get injured a lot and had to try a lot of things until I found the most effective help I could find anywhere. Thankfully, after many years, I've at least tightened down the list of the best sports medicine doctors for me. But one area still remained: internal medicine.

I'm a pretty healthy guy. I don't get sick very often but when I do, I want to see a doctor RIGHT NOW. Many of the internal medicine folks I got referred to were very good, but were also way too busy. When I call for an appointment, I always braced myself for the reply, "Oh he can't see you today, but how about 3 weeks from now?" How is that helpful? Am I supposed to suffer for another 3 weeks just so I can get on a schedule?

Then I found The Total Care Practice. A new look at medical care, I found it to be truly refreshing and back to the way medicine should be. You pay a yearly fee to become a member of the practice, and then you can see them as much as you want (up to a maximum of about 30 visits; a healthy guy like me wouldn't even come close to that!). They always hold time slots open each day in case somebody has an emergency so that there is a time slot they can see you at. Also, you can EMAIL the doctors and....THEY REPLY. WOW. You can ask them any question too!

For a higher yearly fee, THEY WILL EVEN MAKE HOUSE CALLS. WOW. Which doctor do you know will drive over to your house to examine you? And at the same fee level, you get their CELLPHONE NUMBER so you can talk to them virtually whenever you want. AMAZING.

This is the way medicine should be. Doctors be treating you when YOU need them, not when it's convenient for the doctor to see you. Love The Total Care Practice in Palo Alto!

(by the way, the doctor I signed up with is also an avid athlete - an essential requirement for my doctors now, as I have found consistently that doctors who don't train and race have a greatly decreased understanding of the needs of athletes and how to treat them...)

Since I began this heat acclimatization training back in June, I've finally begun to see some nice results. The Bay area has experienced some truly unbelievably hot weather this summer. I've never seen it reach 90+ or even 100 degrees in Palo Alto until this year. However, it's perfect for preparing my body for hard efforts during Ironman.

Every Friday, I've chosen to run mid-afternoon at my favorite park. It's immensely hot, and sometimes I feel foolhardy for training in such hot weather. I prepare my drinks and put extra electrolytes in them. I also back off considerably on pace or else I know I won't make it. Hydration is extremely important and I begin hydrating before I feel thirsty. This has worked well to keep me going. Thankfully, I have also not felt dizzy or nauseaous during running, so a combination of hydration, electrolytes, and heat adaption is definitely working.

This last Friday was a big moment for me. I went out in 95+ degree heat and ran 2:28, finishing 5 loops of my favorite hill loop. I am finding that my mental endurance for the heat has grown a lot, and I don't feel like quitting so much any more due to the oppressiveness of the high temps.

On loop 3, I did begin to worry. One of my discoveries during training in heat was that my legs tend to stiffen up. I think my fascia is protesting the heat and the extra stress it's putting on my body and it starts to lock up and make bending my legs during running a sore affair. I try to loosen up always with some kickbacks during my running and that seems to help. So on loop 3, my legs begin to lock up and I'm worried because I've got 2 more loops to do and I'm wondering whether or not I'm gonna make it.

Miraculously on loop 4, my legs loosen up completely. No more tight fascia at all. Weird. In fact they loosen up so much that I'm able to increase pace for both loops 4 and 5 and am able to complete a nice negative split workout.

All this in 95+ degree weather. Very happy!

I'm not sure that Ironman Florida will be a hot affair. In past years, I've been really lucky at Ironmans that the days have been relatively mild, with the exception of Ironman Austria where the temps were in the mid 80s. But surely I am prepared for a hot race day, as I usually hit the run around 2pm where the day is the hottest.

High temps have been the bane of my racing career and for the first time I think I'm relatively prepared for a hot race day. And if not a hot day, then I'll enjoy running faster in cooler temps.

I went to the doctor this last Wednesday. He thinks it may be some kind of mild constriction of the lung's airways, most likely due to some allergy or some other trigger. I got an inhaler and have been using it the last few days. Amazingly, it has started to clear up almost immediately. Now that more air is coming in, my HR is getting more mitigated and back to normal. I am testing out higher effort workouts now.

Yesterday I went out for a 2.5 hour run. It was about 94 degrees and I intended to do 5 loops of my favorite hill run. On the last two loops, I was able to push it and complete the loops faster than my first 3. Breathing didn't feel bad at all.

Today I went out for a 4:22 ride. I climbed Kings Mountain twice, both with some suggested intervals in the beginning of the climb, with the rest of the climb being at constant power. This also felt OK and I didn't feel too much breathing restriction during the beginning intervals.

Thankfully, I think I'm pulling quickly out of this predicament. I have about 8 weeks left until Ironman Florida and need to build aggressively for the next 5-6 weeks to peak, and then have about a 2-3 week taper before the race.

I'm into week 2 of my overtrained state. I did nothing for 4 days, and then yesterday I went for a test swim as I was going stir crazy. Besides, I am big on active recovery and not just sitting around. I took it very easy, and then tested some very short sprints (25m). HR climbed up but didn't feel like my heart was pounding. I suppose that's a good sign.

Slowly but surely the weird feeling in my lungs is subsiding a bit. I seem to be ok sustaining aerobic workouts, but haven't tested threshold workouts and probably won't until at least next week.

First order of business is to get this feeling out of my lungs and just get back to some state of normalness. Then I can ramp again.

(sigh).

The worst thing for athletes is to just sit around. We always want to do something. But sometimes we need to heal and recover. I just keep telling myself that.

I'm going for a 1.5 hour run today and seeing how things go.

Well, I did it.

I managed to put myself into an overtrained state. Good thing to have caught it early and not have it drag deeper into an overtrained state or else it would probably take longer to get myself out of.

In some ways, it really sucked because I didn't know how much my body could take before getting into an overtrained state. I looked back over the last few weeks of training and know that I was doing a lot of swim sprint workouts, matched with run workouts that had hard, long intervals in them for stamina building, and I was working my way through a bike threshold series which was supposed to increase my tolerance for high heart rates for longer periods of time. Then on the weekends, I would run and bike long which didn't allow for my body to recover enough.

It was too much.

Last week, I sensed I was feeling a bit overworked and resolved to do a lower workout week (which we should all do every 4-5 weeks) to let the body regroup. But heading to NYC on the redeye and being jetlagged, plus having early morning activities, meant that I was sleeping very little and my recovery was hampered by that. I went for a swim on the day I got off the redeye and felt something give in my lungs.

After that, I seemed to remain in that state where you feel like you did a long, hard workout the day before, except that it feels like that every day no matter what you did.

Still I went for a 1.5 hour run as part of my reduced week, as well as a two hour bike. Both were an easy ride and run and I didn't test my aerobic system too much, but in the days after it still felt like I was not all back to normal, able to handle the next day's workouts.

Of course, I hated to admit it to myself but I really needed to take as many days off as possible to get this feeling out of my lungs and my body. So I sit here, typing a blog entry instead of doing a workout.

One of the hardest things for a triathlete to do is to not workout and truly recover. I know I won't lose much fitness, and more importantly I need to recover. However, I can't shake the feeling that maybe I'll lose something more.

Threshold workouts are tempting; you really push hard and feel like you're doing something good. But too many without sufficient recovery put me here now. This coupled with my age and my body's ability to grow into these types of workouts meant that my body just could not keep up and now it's overtrained and needs rest and recovery time. It's all trial and error frustratingly, although I did sense that I was overdoing it. I'll have to watch the warning signs and my intuition more closely in the future.

I just read an article in the NYTimes about Dara Torres, the swimmer who made the Olympic swim team at 41 years of age. The first amazing thing is her age, which challenges the notion that as we grow older we must slow down. In fact, the NYTimes article cites many studies that refute that claim and that we can maintain high performance levels well into advanced age. At some point, I want to post about that once I dig more into age and performance. But the second amazing thing I read was her recovery regimen, which consisted of having two essentially full time trainers who stretch her out and massage her muscles after each workout.

Yesterday I (half) joked with my physical therapist on what would it take to be my personal recovery specialist, meeting me every day (including weekends) after my workouts and then doing her therapy magic on me so that I could recover faster for the next day's workouts. I wasn't able to find a model that worked, but I'm still thinking about it!

In absence of having a personal therapist, we must all bow down to the fact that recovery is important and that it does change over time as we age.

My first clue on this was last year, when I began doing laps up Old La Honda, a 3.3 mile steep climb. I would find that this workout was quite extreme, by my body's standards, and that one day off was not enough to recover me for my normal middle of the week workouts.

Oh I did try though. I would take my usual Sunday off completely doing absolutely nothing. Then on Monday morning, I'd hit the pool and try to run. Sometimes my Monday sprinting workout would be ok, and that was topped out at 2000 meters anyways so the length of the workout did matter. But after that, I would switch into running clothes and hit the treadmill for a workout and found that I could not maintain any sort of endurance workout, let alone a threshold workout at all! I would inevitably peter out at around 20min or less and head to the shower. During these workouts, my heart rate would climb very quickly and my ability to sustain the aerobic, or anaerobic, effort was nearly impossible. Even on the next day when I would ride on my Computrainer, I could not sustain a normal bike workout; high wattages were impossible to maintain, let alone attain them.

Eventually I gave up and listened to my body. I'd take Sunday completely off, and on Mondays, I would try for a swim sprint workout and sometimes I'd be ok. After that, I'd run a form workout on the treadmill for about 20 min. On Tuesdays, I'd do a pedaling efficiency workout for about 30 min and that's it. Then by Wednesday morning, I'd be pretty fully recovered for a great swim and run workout at normal levels.

I'm 42 now. I need more recovery time. But I am also getting faster as my Ironman times have been whittling down race after race. I am pretty sure I have not maxed out my ability yet either, as my marathon time has also been dropping as well. Yet, our conventional thinking has us believing that older people can't still perform and should slow down, and that we can't speed up unless we're stressing our bodies practically every day.

I think conventional thinking is wrong, and many others are thinking that too.

Here are my notes on recovery, and especially for us 42 year old folks who refuse to believe that we can't race Ironman when we're 90:

1. You gotta listen to your body! But you also have to have the right intuition about your body, which can be learned. Sometimes when I get up in the morning, I have developed the ability to really know what my body is capable of at the time. I know when I feel really great (the easiest) and can go out and do a normal workout. I also know that when I just don't have it. These are the times when it's obvious I can't sustain a normal workout and I'd be frustrated quitting in the middle. And then there are the unknown times when I feel a bit tired, but am not sure how much. These are times when I go out facing a normal workout but decide after I warmup. During warmup, I test my body and see how it responds to the efforts. If it doesn't seem to have it, then I either stop or just do a form workout, or just go for an easy ride, run or swim.

2. You need to accept that you may need more recovery days. It was hard for a while, thinking that I was doing something wrong. But I gave up with that notion and proved to myself that I was still improving despite not having a "normal" set of workouts throughout the week. Even this year, as I ramp up laps up Kings Mountain, I find that I need Sundays and Mondays for recovery. As I increase my laps, I may add Tuesdays which was similar to last year. But that's what my body needs and that's what I give it.

3. Recovery doesn't necessarily mean do nothing. Sundays are the days I absolutely do nothing. After the long hard workout on Saturday, I don't think it's a good idea to try anything on that day. But on Mondays and Tuesdays, I practice active recovery, which is do a light workout which activates the muscles and gets circulation going to flush out bad stuff and promote healing. It also lets the body know that you're not going into non-active mode and keeps the body in that place of athletic improvement.

4. Work on neural muscular activation at a minimum if you can't do a normal workout. Instead of running a normal fartlek workout, I might do track form workouts like strides, kick backs, etc. This stimulates my nervous system but doesn't stress my aerobic system which hasn't fully recovered yet. On the bike, I'll do pedaling efficiency workouts which consist of one legged pedaling drills and high RPM spinning. For swimming, it means form practice drills to improve my form. Proper form in all three sports is super important and it is always possible to practice them in lieu of aerobic workouts.

5. Use physical therapy to help your muscles recover. I know we're not all pro athletes, but I go to physical therapists every week and they use ART and Graston to take the tension out of muscles, and help scar tissue realign faster. Otherwise, I would need too much time for my muscles to relax and release tension by themselves due to my age. They help me get back to doing a great workout over the second half of the week. I would love to be Dara Torres and have someone work me over after every workout for recovery. Still working on that!

6. Ice is awesome for recovery, especially ice baths. They really help get the bad aerobic by-products flushed out of muscles faster.

7. I have not found anything that helps my aerobic system recover faster though. It just seems like time and rest are the only thing that really get it back on track. I'll keep looking though.

8. Taking Sportlegs anti-lactic acid capsules also helps to prevent accumulation of lactic acid in your muscles, which increases stiffness and soreness.

The important thing is to acknowledge that we are growing older. We need to be aware of this and accept that we can't train and recover like when we were 20. But the good thing is that if you do this right, you'll still get faster. I know I am.

This last week, after my long ride, I decided to try a pair of compression tights which cover my entire legs instead of just my calves. I was curious to see if they would work on my entire legs, versus just in my calves.

I had a pair of 2XU Tights which I hadn't tried before and put them on now.

It was a warm day in Palo Alto and those tights were kind of warm to wear. I wonder about racing in them during hot climates, but perhaps I would just get used to them. I walked around all day with them and only took them off to go to sleep.

I think they definitely worked. My legs weren't feeling as tight as on days that I didn't wear those tights. The next morning, they were definitely less wiped out and felt fresher than without wearing those tights all day.

I think combining the tights with ice baths, which I will start to do once my ride times get longer, should help my recovery a great deal.

Fascia is this connective sheath that surrounds and holds all of your muscles together. It can contract and relax and helps support the function of the muscles within.

As I train for Ironman, I find that this year, my fascia is creating some more interesting problems. It seems to be tightening up more this year than in previous years.

It's been tightening down on my kneecaps in response to heavy training and causing some pain there during the morning after. My solution is to grab my trusty spoon and give spoonage to the area around the kneecap, which magically causes the fascia to relax and release its clamping down on the kneecap. I also experience the fascia just literally tightening up to a point where my legs are super stiff from running. I have to remember to loosen them up by accentuating my kick back during running, which seems to lessen its pressure. Also, in my calves, the fascia doesn't relax fast enough in the next day; I often have to use my TP Massage Roller to loosen up the fascia around my calf muscles.

No matter what, I go each week to ART and Graston which helps my fascia to release after hard training and gets me going for the next workout. Without it, I would not be able to keep up with training day after day.

This last month I've been slowly ramping out of the base phase and getting my running up to about 1.5 hours. I'll maintain this for many months and don't really need to run more just yet, as I've still got about 6 months to go until Ironman Florida and don't want to burn out.

Last week, I ran my 1.5 hours and the day after my calves felt a bit tight and sore. They felt kind of overworked and it was a bit unusual as I had been running 1.5 hours for my long run for a few weeks now. But it was more warm than usual and I thought that this may have contributed to a bit of extra soreness.

I thought about ways to remedy this and then I remembered my Zensah calf compression sleeves. I got those and put them on and it worked great! First, the compression seemed to relieve the immediate soreness somewhat. By the end of the day, my calves felt much more fresh and a lot of the soreness went away.

This is truly magical! I hope to use my compression sleeves more in my training for Ironman Florida, and I plan on using them during the race, no matter how dorky I look.

My physical therapist turned me on to Anatomy Trains. In their own words, Anatomy Trains are:

"Anatomy Trains provides a precise map of the 'anatomy of connection' - the whole-body fascial and myofascial linkages, leading to holistic strategies for health professionals, movement teachers, and athletes to resolve complex postural and movement patterns."

What all that means is that just because you are sore in one place, that treating that location may not help you in the long run. Local treatment may relieve the symptoms, but it turns out that problems in one area are often the chaining effect of muscles, structures, and posture running all around your body.

I have a classic Anatomy Train issue. When you look at the muscles where I tend to have problems, they all run up and down my body in one of the Anatomy Trains. So when my physical therapist treats me, he doesn't just work on the areas where my tightness/soreness are, he works the whole chain up and around my body to make sure they are all relieved of tension and back into functional mode.

The effectiveness is really amazing. My physical therapist related to me a patient who has this nagging problem and it would not go away, but once he started treating the Anatomy Train in which the problem resided, it turned out that the nagging problem finally went away and the patient's performance also increased!

I find this myofascial stuff fascinating. Years ago, they knew nothing about this and the science and medicine has advanced greatly. Given that I am trying to achieve some sort of athletic excellence relative to myself, and I push my body quite hard given my age and ability to recover, treating my body as a system of Anatomy Trains has worked wonders in keeping me going through the season and injury free.

I arrived home after Ironman Western Australia thinking about compression. Compression socks and tights both for during competition and recovery. It was something that seemed to be gaining in popularity now.

This year's Ironman World Championships in Kona saw Torbjorn Sindballe wearing an all white outfit. It looked rather funky but apparently was a product of research that showed the white outfit would reflect heat and keep him extra cool in Kona. He had on one white glove, into which he puts ice cubes, and knee high white compression socks. He sure looked unusual, but he did get second place so there must be something to that outfit. To hell with fashion!

At Ironman WA, there were people also wearing compression socks. Afterwards, a number of competitors wore compression tights for recovery, as I saw them lounging around in them. I vowed to get some as soon as I got home.

My first order was for some traditional compression socks at Magellans. These socks are made for more mature people, who potentially have the danger of deep vein thrombosis (clotting in deep blood vessels which can lead to stroke) and developing varicose veins. Research has shown that compression socks can help prevent these very serious conditions from happening, especially while sitting for a long time in these awful plane seats on extended trips.

I wore these for a while and they worked pretty darn good at keeping the blood from pooling in my legs and making them swell. Plane seats are notoriously bad for me. They are often too high and put extra pressure on the back of my legs, causing numbness and the swelling as circulation is prevented. Wearing compression socks really helped this and virtually eliminated the swollen feeling in my lower legs and feet. What bothered me a bit about these socks were that they were full socks, and that I had to wash them every time I wore them so that they wouldn't become smelly.

I switched to Zensah compression socks, which allowed me to wear a pair of normal socks while wearing these socks. Zensah socks aren't really full socks; they only cover your lower leg from your ankle up to your knee. I find that I don't have to wash these every time because they aren't covering my feet. Since I fly so much, I wear these every time and have fallen in love with them! (By the way, getting up in a plane and walking around every hour works wonders as well.)

You might think that wearing knee-high socks could work just as well. Apparently, they don't have the same effect. Compression socks are made to have a graduated compression effect upwards from the ankle to the knee. Regular knee high socks aren't made for that. Sorry, you can't go to Target and just buy some athletic tube socks!

Will they help performance or recovery? The jury is still out but promising in the areas of formal research. Informally, it seems that their popularity does say something about their effectiveness. So I find this post is really Part I in my own experiences with compression. I now know that Zensah compression socks are required equipment for flying and keeping my legs fresh on both short and long flights. I bought a pair of 2XU compression tights to see what happens when I wear them after a long, hard workout. I will test this later on this year as I build for Ironman Florida. Also, I am considering wearing my Zensah compression socks during the run of Ironman Florida. Silly looking? Potentially. Gain a few minutes or more...not bad! Avoiding cramps during the run...priceless!

Both the Zensah socks and 2XU tights I bought at my favorite online tri-shop, Trisports.com.

If you want to find out more at this stage, Joe Friel has a great post on compression and tried to find some current research on the topic. I expect there will be more formal research released as the year goes on.

The other week I went to my physical therapist and in a sudden moment of inspiration wondered why I couldn't do Graston at home. I asked him if other patients had pondered this, and also remembered when my other physical therapist once told me that she had done Graston at a race with a butter knife. It seemed possible, and that between visits to their offices, Graston would be an effective way to manage tightness and getting the muscles to calm down in case they get really over-tight during workouts. So after my treatment, I took a picture of a typical set of Graston tools:



This trusty set cost over $4000! And is only available to licensed practictioners of Graston. Well, I wasn't going to get a set that way for sure. Undaunted, I headed down to Westfield Valley Fair Mall and checked out Williams-Sonoma. There were plenty of kitchen gadgets there for sure, but nothing seemed sturdy enough to mimic Graston tools. I then went over to Pottery Barn and found what I was looking for in their dinnerware section. The utensils of various sizes and shapes were perfect! And even more perfect was the fact that there was a holder full of single utensils; I didn't have to pay big bucks to buy a 4 place setting set! I could buy singles. So I selected a bunch to try:



Graston's set: $4000+, my set: $22!

The hard part is seeing if you can get the same effect with the shape of the utensil, as you can with a Graston tool. Through experimentation, Graston tools were organically derived for many purposes by a physical therapist who was also a metalworker. So I started applying these tools to my body to see which ones would work best.

My favorite is the one at the bottom of the picture. It is the spoon which has a square-ish shaped handle. I also bought a butter knife with the same handle and the back of the blade is actually pretty good, but just a bit dangerous when you're using force against your muscles; butter knives are much duller than steak knives, but you can still cut yourself! Still, I may try to file down the blade so it is less sharp. For now, the spoon works great. (By the way, spoons are allowed on carry-on luggage unlike butter knives so I can bring this around with me when I travel.)

It is the edge that is the secret. If it's too rounded, you can't dig into your muscles enough. And if it's not sharp enough (with a broken/not-razor edge), you can't feel the vibrations of the tool which signal you passing over adhesions in the muscle. If you examine Graston tools, you'll find that their edge is actually a (small) rounded edge with a bladed area of about 45 degrees. It allows you to make these "slicing" motions into the muscle, as if you were trying ot shave off a chunk of flesh.

One downside of the spoon; it is too small to get a good grip on to really start digging into your muscles. Graston tools are much more beefier and you can get your whole hand around it to really apply some force to your muscles. When the tool is not so beefy, it is hard to really get force. Maybe that's ok; I am still gunshy about really putting lots of scraping force into my muscles for fear of screwing myself up! But hey, what's life without some adventure?

What I've learned about applying Graston to yourself in the privacy of your own home:

1. Get Graston done on you first. Don't attempt this without watching someone who knows what they're doing and feeling it done to yourself. It's the best way to learn about how it should feel from the patient side. Plus, you can watch and remember the motions and strokes, and how to apply the tool to yourself. You need to learn the various methods of moving or not moving your muscles during application, what to be careful of and what is ok. You can also get a sense for how much force should be applied, and also most importantly, learn what adhesions in your muscles feel like.

2. Develop a sensitivity for feeling adhesions and knots in your muscles with your fingers first. Take some lotion (I use Aveeno) and rub it on the muscle. Then run your fingers across the muscle. If it feels relatively smooth, it has little or no adhesions or knots. But if it does, it can feel like a surface of small potato chip crumbs as it makes this crinkly kind of feeling when you move across it. It can also feel like a bunch of nodules, or it can be one big harder area.

Then develop the sensitivity with the tool itself, as it scrapes across muscles. It will feel as if you're running the edge across a surface of small gravel sometimes, or just a rough surface. Try also running it across other muscles, like your forearm which, for me, is pretty smooth. Then you'll know what non-adhesion filled muscles feel like. Another way to find adhesions and knots is to use a foam roller. This is especially good for larger muscle groups. When you roll onto a big knot, it will feel like a big hard lump and will be painful when you hit that area with the roller.

3. When apply my spoon, I generally keep to the larger muscle areas and shy away from joints. I don't like the thought of accidentally affecting the tendons or hitting a nerve bundle or bone. That would not be a good thing.

4. I usually start off lightly and slow in the stroke. I can gauge how my muscle feels with the spoon being applied and make sure there aren't bruises or some kind of acute pain there as I move the spoon across the area. I don't like to overtreat areas as that may cause greater damage. I also keep away from areas that are bruised, either by me, or from a professional ART or Graston session. You gotta let bruised areas heal; it's not good to keep bruising them up. Bruises tend to restrict motion.

If, after the lighter and slower strokes, I do not feel too much extra pain, I apply more pressure to get deeper into the tissue. Sometimes I increase the speed of the stroke and sometimes I keep it slower. There is definitely an upper limit to speed and I think that extra speed does not work well. It seems to be more the pressure and amount of strokes than stroke speed.

After a few strokes, I feel the area with my fingers. I almost always feel a smoothing out of the area as the adhesions get broken down. I then do another set of strokes, feel the area again, and maybe I'll do it once more. I don't have a set amount of stroke-and-inspect sets to do; it's kind of something I just know that I should stop or go one more. Definitely doing too much is a bad thing.

5. After scraping the muscles, I often will get some more lotion and apply some long, massage strokes to clear out some any fluids that may have accumulated and to help blood flow into the area.

6. I also vary my muscle condition, scraping it in stretched and contracted positions. I also sometimes flex the muscle to really tighten it as I scrape; very tough since it hurts a lot! But varying muscle condition sometimes exposes adhesions which are not apparent while in a rested condition.

7. I find that results are often immediate. Certainly, after a few hours, many aches and pains and tightness magically go away. Wow! All from a spoon and some lotion!

8. You'll find that you'll never be able to use as much force as another person scraping your muscles. You really don't need that much anyways.

9. I also know that there are areas I can't self treat because I can't reach them, or I can reach them but I can't apply enough force on the spoon to make a difference. These are areas like my lower back and my hamstrings. Bummer!

By the way, I can't recommend this to anyone. If you do something wrong, you could really hurt yourself. Treat this article as a curiosity and for knowledge purposes only. Go find a great Graston practictioner and get treated the right way.

After Pac Grove, my left adductor/groin muscle really started to act up. That tightened up and swelled against my hamstring, preventing that from moving freely and thus made that start to tighten up, and then both of those pulled upward on my calf making that all nice and tight as well.

For 2 weeks I thought I was dead. I went to both ART and Graston but nothing seemed to calm it down. But then I finally gave it some rest. I stopped all leg training for about 4 days, but the muscles didn't unflex; they remained very tight and TPMassageRollers and foam rollers both did nothing for them. Graston finally saved the day as rigorous scraping of the muscles caused them finally to stop firing and relax. Kinesio tape was applied to the area and the next morning, I went out for a track workout and amazingly came back with little pain.

That afternoon, I go for more Graston and ART and get re-taped. Then the next day, I go for a 4:55 bike ride and my left adductor/groin muscle doesn't have even a squeak of protest! The Kinesio tape provided some strange, neuromuscular form of support as well as actually supporting the muscle itself. Somehow, I felt more...secure...because the tape was there against my skin in an area which was giving me problems. Also, I was taped to help the muscle remain extended more, so as to help prevent over-contraction and thus cramping. It seems to have also helped it to stay more relaxed!

I hate to use a crutch like taping, but man, I have two more races before the end of the year and if taping is going to get me there, I'm gonna tape up to the NYC Marathon, and then all the way through Ironman Western Australia.

Just ordered some more tape from Kinesio-Tape.com; can't run out of this magic stuff!

Note to self: Need 3 bags of ice in the summertime.

The temperature of "cold" water is now much higher, as well as the ambient room temperature. This causes the ice to melt faster in an attempt to lower the water temperature. 2 bags of ice ran out at about 8 minutes. I think 3 would be just right.

Ow ow...tight tight..ow ow...

Those were the words I expressed when I got up this last Thursday morning. My hamstrings were really tight, probably in part due to the strained poplitiuses (poplittii?) on both legs, with my left poplitius being the worst for wear. But having taken the day off on Wednesday, I knew it could not be tightness or soreness from a previous day's workout. I knew it had to be the dreaded spontaneous formation of adhesions.

I got up and went downstairs and both hamstrings were not loosening up at all. I got into my running clothes and tried to stretch, but stretching could not make the tightness go away. I knew there was only one thing to do. And that was to RUN. I got on the treadmill and warmed up. Both hamstrings took a while to loosen up, but once I got going, things felt better. I did a form run on the treadmill and ending with some accelerations at the end. When I finished, I got off and stretched and felt much better.

I talked to my physical therapist about spontaenous adhesion formation. These adhesions seemingly come out of nowhere and most annoyingly when you're either in taper or in recovery. You get these knots, tightness, and soreness just from sitting around doing nothing. Apparently, there is a natural shearing action of the muscles to break down adhesions as the muscle fibers are working and moving against each other. So when you're working out a lot, adhesions form, but many of them get broken down by you working out. Once you stop working out, like during taper or recovery, your muscles seem to want to bunch up at times and sometimes you think you've really hurt yourself.

I joked with my physical therapist about the fact that once you start racing Ironman, you can't stop ever racing Ironman if simply to avoid the soreness and tightness of spontaneous adhesion formation. It's sometimes worse after a race because your muscles seem to knot up all by themselves in absence of hard work. The only way to get rid of this is to keep training. Race on!

This year my recovery from Ironman is moving at a rapid pace. At my first Ironman (NZ), it took me 6 weeks to fully recover. Last year at IM Austria, it took me 4 weeks. And this time, I think it will be less than 4 weeks. On Friday, I went for a swim and only did 1600m, but I was able to swim with no aerobic problems. Only when I tried to do a fast set that I felt my body jump to LT only after the 3rd 50m of a 6x50 fast set. It was then I just decided to get out of the pool.

Yesterday the same thing happened on the bike. I went out for an hour ride on Foothill Expressway which is flat, gentle rolling terrain. While on that flat terrain, I didn't feel any discomfort at all. Maybe my HR was a tiny bit higher than normal, but I felt pretty good. It was only when I tried to accelerate up a small hill when I jumped straight to LT and I felt like I was exerting much more than normal.

I want to change my recovery from previous years where I went international and basically did nothing for a full week afterwards. I recovered, but the inactivity made it really hard to get back into the activity after such a long layoff. So now I want to try keeping sessions short, but testing where the boundary is between my effort level and when I hit LT. I won't push it too hard, but I want to keep my body stimulated so that it doesn't fall into that area where I can't really pick it up easiliy. I've got a longer season this year with IM WA at the end of the year and need to keep focus for many months after now. In previous years, it's been really tough to rally after my single Ironman and I need to change that.

Or is that a poplitius in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

I went to my Graston physical therapist on Friday and I told her about some pain I was having in the back of my knee. She starts touching the area behind there and I yelp in pain as she applies from massage techniques on my poplitius, this tiny muscle that runs behind my knee. She remarks that it is totally inflamed and very huge, certainly tender to deep tissue massage. Apparently it's a problem common to cyclists.

I've been dropping the heel to engage my hamstrings and glutes during the downstroke of biking. I was focusing on this during Ironman Brazil and it got painful towards the second half of the bike. But now I'm thinking that I shouldn't drop it so much, or otherwise, my poplitius may get overstretched and strained, like in my case now.

Ice and rest is the remedy for the short term.

Selecting medical help is a tough thing. You'd expect that all physical therapists and doctors are the same and that they can all deal with our Ironman training problems. Boy was I wrong.

Not All Practictioners Are Created Equal!!!

If any statement could summarize everything, that would be it. What I've discovered is that pretty much everyone can treat the symptoms. That's what they go to school for. The study the symptoms and related treatments, take lots of hard tests, graduate, and there you go. You go to them and say you have a sore ankle and they can 9 times out of 10 get you back to a pain-free state.

However, things diverge greatly from here. There are a lot of practictioners that don't work on pro-athletes. They concentrate on the masses, whose requirements differ greatly from pro-athletes. Pro-atheltes make their livelihood by getting up every day and going out to abuse their bodies and can't sit on the sidelines for long. They need to be in top physical condition to do it over and over again, and to snap back from injury as soon as possible to get back in the game. You can say to the common working man to layoff jogging for 3 weeks while a knee pain heals, but you're not doing a pro-athlete favors by saying they're going to miss 5 games over the 3 weeks by not being able to play.

Simply not having the experience of knowing what is going to get someone back in the game in the shortest amount of time possible makes them less desirable to the athletic individual.

Then the next level is whether or not the practictioner actually participates in the sport or not. If they do not race triathlons, I have seen a marked difference in knowledge in treatment. They can still treat symptoms, but they cannot give advice on prevention and ultimate elimination of what causes the problem in the first place. So the risk increases that even though you may get a problem treated and healed, that without proper knowledge you'll go out and just do the same activity in the same way to get you injured again.

What to Look For

Since I arrived in the Bay Area in 1987, I have had many injuries ranging from my back to knees to all over my body. I have visited many practictioners in a wide variety of areas and have thoughts about selecting the right practictioner for sports medicine. Here they are:

1. Do they work on pro-athletes? This is the first hint that the practictioner is able to understand the needs of an athlete who wants to get back in action as soon as possible, and is able to deliver. However, I would caution that this is often deceptive as Bay Area athletes often go to many facilities seeking treatment, and practictioners will often advertise this fact to get more patients. It does not singularly guarantee that the practictioner does a good job at getting athletes back in action, although it is the first clue.

2. Does the practictioner perform the sport in which you are participating? Nothing replaces intrinsic knowledge about injuries and prevention than having the practictioner actually perform the sport himself. It is like learning the theory but having no practical experience. True insight comes when the practictioner is out there physically training as well as observing athletes and treating them. Then, the practictioner can have a deeper understanding of what creates problems, knows how to treat them, and how to prevent them.

3. Do you get along with the practictioner? I have walked into offices of pompous, arrogant practictioners and never gone back. Why go to someone whom you don't like or trust? You don't want to dread going back to someone who is goig to be your partner in sports success.

4. Do they listen to you and try to learn from you? Back to 3, so many think they know everything and they don't think there is any other way but what they know. They have to realize that not everyone responds to training and sports in the same way, and that treatments will vary across age, experience, fitness level, etc. They have to listen to what you tell them, be able to assimilate that information, are willing to ask more questions, and then formulate treatment for you.

5. Are they only after your money? I have also experienced practictioners who have making money on the mind. They will tell you to keep coming back even though you don't need to come back just to get an extra bit of money from insurance companies. They treat you, but they don't really care about you as a person. They just want to make more money off you.

6. Referrals aren't perfect. But they are a better starting point than the phone book. Be aware that you still need to check them out, as your friends or coaches will have favorite practictioners, but they may not be right for YOU.

7. Stay away from HMOs. They attract only practictioners who are generalists and aren't specialized enough to deal with a serious athlete's problems.

8. Do they subscribe to the latest theories in sports medicine? Some thoughts below:

a. Do they immediately jump to "you need surgery" to cure a problem? Very bad. Everything else should be tried first. In the old days, practictioners would seek surgery as a way to cure many problems. Nowadays, therapy can take care of a huge amount of issues. Never let anyone cut you open before getting another opinion!

b. I am a big believer in ART and Graston. I would highly recommend seeking practictioners of both of those techniques, as their communities are rich in sharing the latest knowledge and treatments.

c. Does the practictioner talk about the kinetic chain and treatment based on that? A lot of practictioners will only treat the local problem. Your ankle hurts, so you treat the ankle only and hope that the problem goes away, which it probably will...for a while. Often the problem is not just local to where the pain is. It can be caused my a host of problems in muscles all along the chain of movement. For example, I had a recent ankle problem which was caused by tightness up my lower leg and into the calves. Kinetic chain treatment doesn't just address the ankle, but worked my peroneals, my calves, the Achilles tendon, etc.

d. Does the practictioner talk about prevention? For example, running poorly will create a host of problems that will continually come back unless running form is addressed. Is the practictioner knowledgeable enough to make suggestions on the performance of activities in the sport itself to help prevent further injuries?

Get Smart, Don't Be a Victim

Do your research as much as possible into the latest techniques. Learn as much as possible. Do not be a victim to poor and outdated treatments. Find someone who can get you back in the game as fast as possible and who will be as important a partner in your training as your coach.

This year training for Ironman Brazil has been really interesting from a recovery perspective. My high intensity climbing sessions on Old La Honda along with my jump to long rides with 3 hour interval sessions in the middle have really taxed my system more than I have experienced in the past. Chalk it up to increasing intensity, but also my age makes me recover slower.

My recovery after my long Saturdays is taking a full 3 days before I can ratchet back up to normal paces and intensities for my normal weekly workouts. Now, I am taking SportLegs supplements and jumping in an ice bath post my Saturday long sessions. Sunday is an off day, Mondays consist of short form swims of about 1500m, and then I run a form run on the treadmill lasting about 20 minutes. I can only swim/run recovery workouts as I can feel my body reaching LT very quickly during the workouts. It just isn't worth risking overtraining or burning out by attempting to keep to normal weekly intensities. Tuesday morning I'm on my bike trainer, but either I am doing a pedaling efficiency workout for recovery or reduced wattage normal workout, as I cannot sustain normal wattages. My quads are still tight and I do not want them to seize up and wreck the rest of the week's workouts. By Wednesday morning, however, my body seems back to normal.

Listening to my body is crucial. My fitness level, my recovery ability and my age are all factors in how I recover and I have to really accomodate that or else I could really tank my race preparation.

Aaaah....an ice bath after a hard run today works wonders. But how to get into that bathtub of freezing water? Here is Dave's patented method of successfully performing an ice bath:

1. Prepare. No, not just mentally, but get 2 bags of 7lbs. of ice from 7-Eleven, a towel, something to drink if you want, a watch or clock to time yourself. If you can, get something warm like coffee or tea. Put the ice bags on the ground next to your bathtub. Put the watch/clock, drink, and towel within reach.

2. Get into the bathtub and sit in it empty. Mistake #1: Filling up the bathtub and dumping ice cubes in it and THEN trying to get into it is near impossible. I guarantee it. Just try it. I have never done it without screaming. Try my way; it's better. So get into the empty bathtub and sit in it.

3. Turn on the cold water. The water will slowly fill up and your body will adapt to the cold water much easier than if you were to jump into a tub full of it instead. I would recommend not moving too much; too painful with cold water sloshing onto exposed body parts!

4. Keep filling it up until it crests over your thighs. Yes your private parts will be freezing by now. Don't worry; it's only for about 10 minutes or so. It will still work.

5. Turn off the water. Then carefully reach over and grab one ice bag. Rip it open and dump the ice cubes into the water. Push the ice cubes around until they are all around the tub. The coldest areas will be nearest the ice cubes.

6. When the first bag of ice nearly melts away, which is about 5-7 minutes, take the second bag of ice and dump it in.

7. You can time yourself about when the water crests your thighs. SIt in there at least 10 minutes but probably not more than 15. You don't need to prove that you're a real man. Just enough to get the restorative effect on your abused muscles.

8. Time's up! Get out of the tub and run to the shower and take a nice, long hot one. The hot water blasting against your body will causing a flushing effect to remove the iced toxins and exercise by-products away from your muscles. Great job!

Now that I'm peaking for Ironman Brazil, it's critical that I recover fast enough to get to the next workout. So I plan on using ice baths after both long run and long bike. Believe me it works great. Enjoy!

Many times after we work out, all we want to do is just take a shower, eat, and maybe take a nap.

Nowadays, I have to pay attention to what I do afterwards because if I don't, I'll pay for it with lesser performance during workouts in the following days.

This was brought to the forefront 2 weeks ago when, on Friday, I ran some hard hill repeats and then the day after I went to climb Old La Honda on my bike. Both were very difficult and taxing, and the day after my bike ride I was tight but feeling not so bad. But 2 days after, my quads and hams really got tight and felt really non-recovered after 2 days. Working out was tough as the warmup loosened them up somewhat, but not as much as I liked. Each workout was harder for me to put max effort into, and I didn't feel optimal although I did get through my workouts. It wasn't until I hit my weekly ART and Graston treatments that the muscle knots were finally released and they felt back to normal.

I thought about this and thought about my usual post-workout ritual, which I had not been doing. After I get home from a hard workout, this consists of:

1. Down a glass of Endurox recovery drink.
2. Jump in the shower.
3. Stretch everything.
4. Foam roller.
5. Ice (optional).
6. Go eat a big meal.

The last few workouts, and especially my last hard one, I did not foam roller. This last weekend, I did one more hill repeat on the run and was planning to see if I could do Old La Honda twice (but only did 1.5 before I ran out of juice). I knew it would be hard on the bod and resolved to go through my complete ritual, even if I didn't feel like it.

It worked like a charm.

The missing element this time was foam rolling my legs post-workout. I rolled them (it was definitely painful at points) but mostly it was good to massage the muscle and help clear out all those annoying by-products like lactic acid which will tighten up muscles the next day or the day after.

Now that it's a day after, my legs feel amazingly good even after completing a harder workout than the previous week. It just reinforced the fact that I shouldn't skip any steps in my post-workout ritual, or else it will result in reduced or more difficult performance in subsequent workouts in the next week. This is not a good thing for triathletes, who have to stuff 3 sports into one week and recovery is important to be able to get to the next day's workout, which is sometimes two sports, or even all three.

In my quest for finding new running shoes, I noticed I was getting more blisters than normal. After about 30 min of running, especially on the treadmill, I could feel some serious rubbing on my soles, which would ultimately lead to swelling of my feet and then severe blistering.

I tried everything. Lube on my feet. Nope. Wider shoes. Nope. Tying looser or tighter. Nope.

Then I thought that maybe my socks had something to do with it. I ran down to Sports Basement and bought some Wright socks advertised as "frictionless".

And that was it. Apparently, my other socks were old enough such that fabric was wearing down and getting abrasive and especially when they got wet from my sweaty feet, the friction would really do a number on my soles.

With the new socks, the fabric hadn't broken down yet. Plus, these had some funky design so that they would help prevent blisters.

Amazing that just keeping socks new would help me here. You learn something new everyday...

About two months back, I started getting sore in my wrists and forearms when I practiced piano. It was at a time when I was perfecting my stroke and really working hard at strength, having increased my paddle usage and seeing good results.

I did not want tendonitis to develop, nor to watch it go towards carpal tunnel syndrome. Seeing many people with wrist braces made me want to get this treated immediately!

I went to my physical therapist and asked her if Graston could help with my problem. I thought that generally, tendonitis comes from overuse and tight muscles which don't get released, as well as putting the joints and muscles in awkward alignment when performing an action. So correcting my form while playing piano was not too hard. I just sat further away from the piano and my wrists are straighter. But performing a good catch while swimming and then pulling back in a shallow way does put more stress on the forearms. Couple that with piano playing and you get sore forearms!

It turned out Graston was great for this. As I get Graston applied to any muscle on my body, I find that the rough handling of the muscle, while painful during treatment, seems to relax and release tension when the treatment is done. It's uncanny and my physical therapist says that they are still studying why this happens. Maybe the muscle gets abused so much that it just says "Enough! Uncle!" and just relaxes. Ha. I am sure there is a more scientific, neuromuscular explanation.

So she takes her metal tools and scrapes up my forearms. It hurt like crazy in the beginning! But man did it work well. It kept my muscles loose after workouts and piano practice and the soreness was under control.

In the off season now, I just got Graston on my forearms and they didn't hurt at all. The lack of swimming these last few weeks has taken so much stress off them that piano playing by itself didn't tighten up the muscles enough to cause soreness.

I can see where Graston applied to the forearms can definitely help the athlete, the musician, and ultimately us computer techno-generation of mousers and typists from getting sore wrists.

Alas, I turned in my NYC Marathon timing chip yesterday. I had hoped that some miracle would have happened and my hacking cough would have gone away. But no such luck.

I am very disappointed to be brought down by a sickness. 4 months of training, seeing great track times and growing strength on hill repeats - it was tough to realize that my body would not hold up to 4 hours of max performance in cold weather racing (it's been in the 40s everyday I've been here in NYC; the last 3 years I ran NYC it was in the 70s!).

Rather than risk this developing into something REALLY bad like pneumonia, I elected to not race. It's a first for me: to not race due to sickness and it was bound to happen sometime.

At least I was able to defer my entry until next year. Not sure if I will race it though; I've got my sights on either Ironman Florida or Ironman Western Australia and that may mean that NYC isn't possible. NYC is usually on the same weekend as IM Florida, as it was this year. IM Western Australia is usually on Thanksgiving weekend or the first weekend of December, which means NYC is very close to the race.

Onwards to off season training. I want to work on strength in my legs this winter, in preparation for a strong race season next year.

A buddy of mine just started a new site called dailystrength.org. It is a place where you can get support and advice for various problems or issues you may have in a multitude of areas of your life.

There was a post about running and knee problems, and how people were down on running and didn't know how to solve those problems.

So I posted my 3 big solutions to my running problems, as the combination of these has basically kept me running injury free for about 2 years now. In addition to that, there are 2 more solutions which also contributed to my injury free state:

The big 3:

1. I use hard orthotics. Not the soft kind you find at a shoe store, but ones that are created from plaster molds of your feet. They basically remove any and all possibility of pronation and, thus, one source of strain to your knees and muscles.

2. I run using the Pose Method, which teaches running on the balls of your feet and definitely NO HEEL STRIKING. Running on the balls of your feet means that there is one extra joint to absorb impact and has been shown through some studies to reduce impact stress by as much as 50%.

3. Every week I go to get ART and Graston Technique. The two methods of massaging your muscles remove adhesions that form and build up over time. If they build up over time, then your muscles get less flexible and the possibility of injury increases as the muscles get tighter and tighter until all sorts of bad things happen.

The 2 other things are:

1. The old method of training meant beating up your body again and again until it breaks down to the point of injury. The new way has recognized that you don't need to beat up your body as much as previously thought in order for peak performance. Your body needs rest and time to grow stronger. So no more overtraining leading to pain and injury!

2. Crossover training effects from swimming and cycling have immensely affected my running ability. It has also meant that I don't need to break down my body by running alone in order to be at some high level of fitness. I can improve my abilities through other less impact activities and run faster.

This week I was having calf problems. They come and go now, but for a while it was a huge challenge as my calves adapted to the Pose Method of running, or running more on the balls of your feet. Although they say it takes 2-3 months to adapt, it took me a good year to be running without consistent calf soreness. Thank god for ART to realign built up scar tissue and make my damaged calf muscles functional again!

But this last week it was one of those times when my calves acted up, as they will on occasion over time. I went in to see my Graston Technique sports medicine doctor. After some painful but incredibly helpful scraping of the calves with Graston tools, the knots were cleared out.

Then, she took this weird tape out and proceeded to cut it into a 3 strips, but attached at the bottom. Sort of like a pitchfork. She takes this tape configuration and tapes it to my right calf, which is the most problematic. Very funky.

This tape sticks to skin like nothing I've seen. You can swim with it and it won't come off. It causes some sensation in the muscle to the body that it's being supported, and the tape does help keep the muscle supported and not swinging around to cause or at least minimize damage.

She tapes me up knowing that I am an athlete, and athletes seldom just sit around with injury. I tell her that the next day I need to do my long run so she knows that I'm going no matter what, so might as well try something to help.

I go out for a 14 mile, 2:18 run. My calf starts hurting midway, but hell I have to finish my run so I keep going. It's pretty sore all the way to the end. But then, when I get home, I do notice one difference. The pain has stopped! It was only sore while running and when I got home and subsequently walking around, I find that there almost no pain at all! Somehow this tape did really support my calf, even though it was sore through the run. I am sure it would have hurt more and been hurting for a long time after if I had not. I probably would have injured it again. I suspect the pain was more protesting while it was in the healing process. After all, she treated me and then I immediately went running on it without giving it enough time to truly heal!

This tape is called Kinesio Tape. It's expensive but I highly recommend it. You can get it at: Kinesio-Tape.com. They even sell books on how to tape up your muscles. Cool!

After a few weekends of long rides, I am finding that it takes 2 days to recover. I am growing older and my body is changing, and needing more time to recover after long, hard efforts. So I am on a quest to figure out how to recover faster.

I now foam roll before and after working out, and stretch. I also use ART to help realign scar tissue to make it functional. And I have started using ice baths.

Recommended to me by my coach and my ART physical therapist, the flushing effects of the icing and the ensuing blood flow after warming back up helps remove lactic acid and shortens time for recovery. Previously, I only did this after Ironman New Zealand and after every NYC Marathon. It sure makes me feel better after a long race.

I once tried to fill up my bathtub with frigid, ice filled water and step into it. HA! Impossible! No way could I step into that!

I have to sit in an empty bathtub first. Then I fill the tub with cold water and let it fill above the level of my thighs. Then and only then do I load the water with ice. I use two big bags. I dump one in until it almost melts away. Then I load in the other bag. This keeps a frigid water bath going for about 10 minutes, which is about as long as I can stand it!

Then I go take a warm shower, which helps the flushing effect after the icing effect. I hope that it will reduce my recovery time. I'll find out tomorrow on Monday.

This week I backed off cycling training. No matter what I did, I was very low energy and just could not summon enough juice to work out at wattages and intensities in previous weeks.

What a frustrating thing. I am now building to my next race in June and feel that backing off now interrupts my progress. But I am trying to rationalize better and listen to my body.

A intuitive training regimen is prescribed by my coach. There will be lulls in my energy naturally and forcing my way through them without rest is only going to increase frustration and potential injury.

Some training programs have them built in every 4 weeks. Those coaches reduce volume by up to 50% on lower intensity weeks. My coach prefers to program them in based on how the body feels, as they do not occur as regularly as training programs schedule volume breaks.

They can also be sport specific. My swimming and running apparently have not been affected, while my cycling has clearly had a down-energy turn. Time to do a series of easy bikes for this week and then see how I do next week.

Electrostim is great. You crank it up as far as you can stand and it makes your muscles jump around like crazy. It stimulates your muscles into healing, helps blood flow, and is sometimes used to exercise the muscles.

Well...sometimes.

Yesterday I have two electrostim pads hooked up to each hamstring. I crank it up to as much as I can stand but something goes wrong. It causes my hamstrings to really lock up and they hurt!

I ask for the electrostim to be backed off but it's too late. Microtears occur in my hamstrings and it wrecks today's workout. Both hamstrings feel overworked and like they're gonna cramp at any moment.

Another lesson learned. Too much of a good thing sometimes ain't.

Today I heard the most funny term - grasterbating.

It's basically doing what your sports medicine doctor does to you, but in the privacy of your own home. In this case, it is the Graston Technique, which uses these scary looking metal tools to scrape away adhesions that form in your muscles. It feels like someone is taking a knife and trying to take thin slices out of your flesh. So if you have no adhesions, it actually doesn't hurt all that much. But if you do, it hurts like hell!

After doing this for a while, I find that when I run my fingers over my muscles, I'll find these small bumps and it disgusts me. All I want to do is get rid of them because if they build up, they can cause injury during training or racing.

But I can't see my Graston doctor every week, or at least at the frequency at which these adhesions form. I want them gone NOW.

So tomorrow, I go to Williams and Sonoma and Pottery Barn in search of various kitchen utensils which I can use to apply Graston to myself...and grasterbate in the privacy of my home.

My right leg is stronger than my left. So for 4 decades, my body has adjusted to this fact and it has left me unbalanced. Unbalanced so much so that I've noticed during races that I tend to (annoyingly) cramp my right leg on biking and running.

I asked my PT guy at Team Clinic to help me with this. He started me on some exercises in the Egoscue Method. In Peter Egoscue's own words:

"Focusing on proper alignment, posture, and muscle engagement, Egoscue provides simple but powerful techniques to restore flexibility and function while at the same time boosting energy, revving up the immune system, even raising the body's metabolic rate."

I've been doing some simple exercises which are designed to awaken unused muscles and shut down others, and at the same time evening them out from one side to another. They also strengthen unused muscles in addition to stretching others.

As I do some of the exercises, I feel different sensations between both legs. It was really strange to feel stretching and pulling in different areas. It only shows the imbalance between the two legs. But after I started the exercises, I could already get some of the sensations equaled out on both sides.

I look forward to starting the training season and seeing if this has had significant effect.

Read more about it at Egoscue.com. I just bought this book, The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion : Revolutionary Program That Lets You Rediscover the Body's Power to Rejuvenate It - Pete Egoscue from amazon.com.

I'm heavy into the off season now, and not doing much training at all. It's a great time for recovery, for recharging my body and brain from all the stress I've put on it over the past year.

But one thing has been confounding me.

Why is it when I am doing practically nothing, that I feel all these sharp aches and pains in my legs? And they feel as bad as when I REALLY have tweaked them during heavy training?

I asked my physical therapist about it. He says it's because during the normal, heavy training season, you've got your body flooded with nice pain-killing endorphins. They're there to kill as much pain as possible and keep you functioning despite all the damage your muscles are receiving (which is required for growth and improvement).

However, during the off-season when your training has backed off - guess what - so have your endorphin levels. So now you have nowhere near as many endorphins in your system and thus, small aches and pains which you may not have felt at all during the training/racing season are now brought to the forefront, and in greater pain levels than you would think. Small tweaks during the race season aren't even felt and drop below the noise level created by the endorphins!

Then, I asked my physical therapist about the knots that have formed in my muscles. How could they form, when I rarely put my muscles in a stressed, contracted state as I normally see during race season training? I can feel them clearly as I roll my hands/fingers across my thighs and IT band.

He said that during periods of high activity, the muscles constantly move against each other, and there is a natural effect of breaking down these knots and adhesions as muscle fibers glide against each other. Once you remove that, there is a tendency for these muscle adhesions to form because there is less muscle activity to clear the small adhesions out.

All this just makes me itch to get back into race training - guess that's what the off-season break is all about...!

These last few weeks I've asked my PT folks at Team Clinic to apply their Active Release Techniques (ART) to improving my performance. Basically, years of adhesions and scar tissues, as well as shortening of muscles and muscle structures, have led to restrictions in movement, which then lead to compensations in muscles which get overworked because other muscles aren't working, which then leads to lessened performance or injury.

So they use ART to get to critical muscles and muscle structures (ligaments, tendons, etc) and break down some of the adhesions, allowing freer movement and less restriction, thereby increasing in athletic efficiency and reduced possibility of injury.

Well, one thing I gotta say is that it hurts like crazy. When the ART practictioner digs his thumb into your psoas and tendons connecting to your hip, I am writhing in pain and screaming in the clinic. Nobody pays attention because screaming during ART is commonplace and nobody really cares anymore...except the new patients who always wonder what they've gotten themselves into....hahah.

He then repeats this with all my major muscle groups, and then goes to my glutes where the other major restriction point is. And then it's another 3-5 minutes of writhing in pain.

But the results are staggering.

I was doing some 800s and 200s on the track this last week. Prior to this track session, I was working out with 400s at about 1:45. Just before the Pac Grove Triathlon, I cranked out a 1:39 400m and wasn't winded. This last week, I improved my time to running 800s between 3:11 and 3:21. Now usually when one runs 400s at 1:45, an 800 is run sometime slower as you're pretty much maxed out for each interval. So if you take my 400m time of 1:45 and multiply it by 2, you get 3:30 which is supposedly not a time you're able to sustain for a few intervals, as you're supposedly maxed out at 1:45 just to get to the end of the 400m.

So somewhere along the line, my efficiency has improved. My 800m time should predict that I should be able to run 400s at least at 1:35!

And then for my 200m time, I consistently cranked them out at :45, which is a whopping 6:00/mile pace!

WOW.

A few years ago, I never would have thought I could have run that fast. But here I am running that fast and still there seems to be room for improvement.

Medical and sports science have advanced so much in the last few years. Our understanding of how performance is achieved and how to increase performance is so much higher now than that of 10 or 20 years ago.

I'm using all of that and applying it to myself. It's all a big science experiment.

How fast can Dshen REALLY go?

Some parts sure hurt a lot, like the ART, or today's 2:15 run negative split workout where I pooped out right before the end (arg). But man, this pain is leading to some really great gains.

Stay tuned....

ART stands for Active Release Techniques. It has been my savior over the last few months leading up to the NYC Marathon and Ironman NZ.

It is a unique massage technique which breaks down scar tissue, inducing recovery and healing, and also prevention/curing of scar tissue which is from muscle fibers breaking down and laying down in the wrong direction from normal healthy fibers.

It works great. It also hurts like hell!

I get it at Team Clinic in Santa Clara, CA. The guys there are fantastic and they love watching me scream and writhe in pain as Dr. Steve works on my legs and shoulders. It seems that only crazy triathletes like me go for the full-body ART - hurts so bad during treatment but hurts so good later on.

To think I pay for this....

I have to credit ART and Team Clinic for keeping my body together as the training got more intense. If there ever was someone who could put Humpty Dumpty back together again, these guys could and did with me.