I just spent 5.5 hours on the bike. And it must have been 40 degrees when I started at 9am and by the time I was done I was pretty frozen. How dedicated I am! …Or crazy…
I was totally amazed at the number of runner out there wearing nothing but a t-shirt and shorts. There is absolutely no way I would have run in weather like that. My skinny little bod would have gone into hypothermia!
Countdown: 6 weeks to Ironman New Zealand!
Author Archives: dshen
Swim Secrets
These last two weeks I’ve been trying really hard to reinforce two things in my swimming.
1. The Catch
My coach tells me about 2 weeks ago that I drop my arm and I don’t catch before I stroke. So I start really relaxing my upper arm and make sure I bend at the elbow before my upper arm moves, feel pressure against my hand, and then stroke strongly through the movement. What a difference it made! Now my strokes generate more power and create propulsion for a longer period of time, versus catching later in the stroke and only creating propulsion about half the stroke of the arm.
2. Body position
I am what you would call a “butt dragger”. My body proportions don’t let me easily rest horizontally on the water. I tend to droop towards my legs and this creates tons of drag. So I did two things.
The first thing was to really use my head as the body positioner. Most of the coaches tell you to “press the buoy” or “press the armpit”. This didn’t work for me. I still dragged my butt. But I tried something else. I instead press my chin and extend my head. This action enabled me to move my butt higher and be more needle like and horizontal on the water, thus minimizing my drag.
The second thing was to really relax my entire body, instead of tensing, and just roll it back and forth while keeping it needle like. This conserved energy and allowed me to focus on body roll to create power in my stroke. Thus, I did not waste energy feeling nervous about sinking or going faster. I was smoother and devoted all energy to catching the water, stroking while body the rolled to increase power.
Before I did this, I was hard put to sprint 100m at 1:55. This morning I sprinted 1:44!
M2: My Ironman Coach
Mike McCormack has been instrumental in getting me to perform better than ever before. I highly recommend his training at M2: Triathloncoach.com.
His general philosophy is one of quality versus quantity, and judicious use of periodization and interval training to improve fitness and performance. Amazingly, most of his bike training is indoors on a computrainer which allows controlled and measurable improvement, versus junk miles on the road. Even the treadmill is a useful tool to train hills versus finding the exact right hills to run up and down outside.
Given that it’s winter in northern California, this is critical to have training resources indoors, especially given the monsoons that we’ve been experiencing lately.
Training Training Training
In 2002, I got into triathlons with Team in Training. Since then I have been racing continuously every year.
What a necessary component in my life! Going through all my life changes, I needed a way to release stress and to be able to “void” my brain for long periods of time.
Training was perfect for that. It let me blow off steam, keep healthy, and to rest my brain from all the crap that was going through it every day.
It also was very different than the weight lifting I used to do. Doing one type of training was getting monotonous, however much I did like weight training.
But getting into swimming, biking and running really allowed me to discover many new things about me and my body.
First, each one of these sports is highly technical…more technical than I thought. Yeah we can all go out there and thrash around in the water, pedal, or just jog. But what I didn’t know was that there are highly evolved ways of doing all three of these sports to maximize performance and minimize injury.
Learning these new skills has been a fantastic experience! It really stressed my brain and my nervous system in different ways! And it made a huge difference in how fast I was moving in all three sports! I was really impressed by how much science has gone into all of these.
Way back when I started running, I really messed up my knees. But now looking back, I could see how screwy my running was, and how the technology, ie. my sneakers, were so primitive compared to now.
Second, it really tested my body. Not having been athletic in my youth, I had to reactivate all these muscles that have lain dormant for..oh…about 30+ years now. Now they are getting awakened and I am doing things I never thought I could do physically.
But also, there have been many doubters in my life with respect to athletics. They have constantly said, “Don’t hurt yourself, you might get hurt, better not overdo it, you’re older now…gotta watch out…” I say “fuck em” because I’m swimming, biking, and running faster than ever before and I’m heading for Ironman New Zealand in March this year and with little or no injury at all.
Watch out world, countdown to Ironman T-7 weeks!