"Amazing"

The more I learn about training the human body, the more I realize how little I know.  I am primarily from the old school, which basically means that I believe that lots of hard work will translate into lots of success.  The problem with that is that I can't seem to get all the workouts in that I think I should, because I am often too tired from the previous days efforts.

Take today for example.  I expected to be tired when I got in the pool at 9 am and so it was a relative easy effort.  But this afternoon when I went to run the trails I was simply flabbergasted. I felt like an invalid.  I wss winded after 30 seconds believe it or not.  I'm pretty sure that this shouldn't be the case, and in fact I suspect I probably went too hard yesterday.   And it was probably not necessary.  

There is just so much more sophistication available today that can tell you based on things like heart rate and power output what you should be doing.   I have often thought of it, but the only way to get that  information is to do a bunch of testing to determine things like your anaerobic threshold.   Once you have that, the theory says that you should be able to structure your workouts more specifically.  This in turn should always leave you prepared for the next effort whether it be intended to build speed. or power, or endurance.

I mentioned power output and believe it or not they actually have devices that can measure this in real time while riding your bike....not just on the trainer, but on the road.  This allows you to judge your effort much better regardless of the conditions.  All I use is speed which is obviously affected by wind and temperature.

The problem is that I'm not a very sophisticated guy and as such will probably just keep plugging away in the same old fashion, at least through this Ironman.  Even though it scares me to do so, I am gonna focus on making my long efforts easier, both the bike rides and the runs.  I think that's the right thing to do.

(swim 1000 metres, 20 min trail walk)

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."---Leonordo da Vinci

Love

Peter