Guernsey Triathlon Club

Next Event: Christmas Splash & Dash Sun 20 Dec, Beau Sejour

TRAINING

In this new section our panel of experts will be providing their top training tips.

After a successful first triathlon at Portelet and the start of the triathlon season now open our panel have provided some top tips to prepare you for the summer ahead:


Alan Rowe Triathlon	Paul Brehaut Cycling	Jennifer Roussel Swimming

Swimming by Jennifer Roussel - May 2009

Pool to sea might be daunting so definitely get lots of practise in the weekly group swim sessions starting Friday 8th May. This will get you used to the temperature; learning to sight and use landmarks to guide you around a course; knowing the safe routes to take around rocky areas; coping with a big swell or large waves which can make you feel sea-sick!

Invest in a good tri wetsuit. Try it on before you buy and ensure that it is a very snug fit but with minimum amount of restriction around the shoulders.

Swimming in a wetsuit in the sea is very different to swimming in bathers in the pool. It will give you a good degree of buoyancy that assists sinking legs but also might restrict your arm movements tiring them out sooner than you realise, so build up strength in your shoulders with resistance training in the pool (eg use paddles(when permitted by lifeguard), mitts, drag shorts, pull without kicking with feet about 20 inches apart and no pull buoy).

In the pool practise breathing to your non-favoured side as in the sea if the wind and waves are hitting you on your favoured side you will just inhale wretched sea-water!

In the pool also practise sighting as you will need to lift your head up every 6 strokes or so and catch sight of the landmark you need to be aiming for to guide you around the course in the shortest distance. It is deceptively easy to stray off course in the sea with no black line to follow! To disrupt your rhythm least, practise rolling your head/eyes, from the point at which you are breathing to the side smoothly, around to the front, sight, then return your head smoothly back into the water and continue frontcrawl for another 6 strokes or so and repeat.

One of the important lessons I learnt quickly was to put some form of anti-chaffing cream at the front of my armpits and on my neck as the continual rubbing of wetsuit on skin leaves a nasty sore rash. Wearing a rash vest would also help when just doing practise swims. Some people use vaseline but others say it degrades the rubber in the wetsuit as it is petroleum based. Some use a product called 'Body Glide' which can be found on the internet; this uses a deoderant-style applicator and is not petroleum based.

Goggles: Specific open water ones can be purchased which are a cross between a mask and normal swimming goggles. They give you a better all round view and some find them more comfortable.

Improving your Cycling by Paul Brehaut - May 2009

Well done to you all who completed the novice tri. It is now time you start training for longer events. Here are a few tips to help you on the bike leg:

I always brake my week up into 4 rides. 2 x long endurance, 1 x speed, and 1 x power. It would be something like this:

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Rest	Power	Endurance	Speed	Rest		Race

Power: would be on a long hill i.e. L’Eree or Talbot valley where you can get into a rhythm, sit far back on the saddle, hands close to the stem, shoulders back, making sure your legs do a full circle. When you start, pick a gear that is slightly hard and stay in that gear until you get to your finishing point. Repeat this x2 times.

Speed: Use a clear safe road like Vazon/L’Eree/Pembroke. Mark a starting point in your head and a finishing point; it should be about 2k long or 2 minutes long. Do this x3 times. You should feel totally empty after this. After the second week add 1 set per week, until you get to 6 x 1k.

Endurance: This is long steady riding where you should be able to chat to your training partner. Depending on what races you have coming up is how long the Endurance rides are. I said 2 x Endurance rides but as we are into the race season now, the more races you can do the better, (join the Velo club) and push yourself in Time Trials, you can use the Velo TT’s as a brick set. Or get a second Endurance ride in with a run immediately after. Back off the training the week of a Tri, cut down the training by approx 50% on the bike. Always ride for about 10 minutes before you put your body under extreme pressure like the Speed and Power and cool down for 10. Good luck, have FUN

Brick Training by Alan Rowe - April 2009

After the super duathlon at Les Amarreurs the CTV reporter asked me about what you do to overcome "Jelly legs" as he referred to them - that sensation experienced after climbing off the bike and trying to run and it feels like you've woken up in the dark and put the wife's legs on by mistake ( or husband / partners' for that matter) and find that they just don't work like the ones you are used to. Frankly I told him, all you can do is practice it time and time again. So what this boils down to is doing bricks.

Bricks are the tri training term for putting together two or more of the Tri disciplines together in one training session. Commonly this involves putting together running and biking as through our winter this is by far the most practical combination. Through the thick of winter I try to introduce a bit of running to the end of the Sunday morning long ride. It can often take me 5 minutes to strip off all the winter layers, change into running kit and get out again but at least the two disciplines follow each other. I start with a 15 minute run and usually build it up to 35 minutes or so - as that is similar in terms of time on feet at the Olympic Distance races. Our Sunday session is all about aerobic conditioning so I'm not looking to run fast but I am looking to help educate the body into running when fatigued, so my concentration is on maintaining good form and economy.

If you are racing Half Ironman or longer then certainly extend the length of the run - as you will have to cope with more 'time on feet' so it makes sense to extend the conditioning, but remembering not to "strain". When you are fatigued at the end of a long session you are most prone to injury so we don't want to overdo the length of run.

The best stimulus and adaption to being able to cope with the change from bike to run comes when you can minimise the transition time as it is training the nervous system to start firing muscles in a different way from turning the crank, to striding out. I have found a great way to do this is a multi brick session. I've performed this style of session on the road or on the turbo, and have combined 6 runs of 1km interspersed with 5 bikes of about 5km. A friend's house at Albecq offers a 1km run loop and an out and back to the end of Vazon sorted the bike. On horridly windy or wet days I have also done this by setting up the turbo at home for the bike portion and braving the weather on the run. We also used this in acclimatisation sessions before the Rhodes Island Games where we had turbo's and treadmills set up in a horticultural greenhouse and maintained 35 degrees C heat.

By repeatedly changing bike to run, run to bike you gradually educate the nervous system to adapt better to the change. Also as a relatively short session it is one that can be executed at faster than race pace so it becomes a high quality work out - I view it as a key session in a training week.

The other bricks I do through the season is try to run after most Velo Club time trials, the difference here is that as I have given my all in the time trial, the change to the run is far harder than it is when I'm doing a duathlon or triathlon. This mentally prepares me for racing multi-sport as I know what sort of pain to expect and to know I can overcome it. Usually starting the run in a tri or duathlon feels easier than the post Time Trial runs as I have been spreading my effort more evenly.

Having dealt with duration and intensity the final factor is frequency. How often? I'd suggest that you try to get a formal brick in every week during the main phases of the training cycles. (See Training Presentation from last Autumn.) The intense bricks or running easy off of a hard bike session or time trial are more a feature of spring and summer training. Then there are the bricks by stealth. By virtue of the fact that I bike to work and then onto training sessions, I am regularly putting the disciplines together in an unstructured way. When I first started cycling from work in North Plantation to the track at Footes Lane, the climb up St Julian's Avenue always used to kill my legs for the run session and I'd never feel like I had good legs. Over time my body has adapted and now I consider riding the bike to and from training sessions to be good warm up or warm down. The constant stimulus of switching between running and biking, biking and running is established and continuously reinforced. Being largely an adaption of the nervous system, improving the ability to run efficiently after biking is one that can readily be improved. So to avoid wrong leg selection errors, get down to some brick work.