Trains, Travels

I’m not exactly sure when I was first introduced to the concept, I think it was during a month long training camp on Lanzarote back in 2009. Following a disastrous race I returned from the island willing, or perhaps sufficiently desperate, to try anything in the pursuit of better performance. Many changes followed, it would be hard to pin subsequent successes on one, but thirty days of running remains strongly associated with a breakthrough. A simple idea: a handful of rules necessitating consistency.

Thirty runs of at least thirty minutes in thirty days.

The appeal was obvious, I liked the rules, I liked the simplicity and I liked the symmetry around thirty. I knew there was nothing special in this number, it was an arbitrary choice, about a month of regular running without interruption. Focussing on frequency, its significance came in the form of discipline, demonstrating a willingness to just keep training. Tired, hungry, wet or miserable – I would still have to go out and put one foot in front of the other. But there was nothing to stop me running further or faster should I feel inclined.

Of course I adopted a hardline approach: I had to run – or at least run/walk – every day and it had to be for at least thirty minutes. There was no banking extra runs to earn a break, I could run once, twice or even three times in a day and I would still have to run the day after. There was no dividing the time, I couldn’t top up a twenty-five minute run in the morning with five minutes in the afternoon, thirty continuous minutes, one after the other. There were no free passes. Break the rules just once and the game was over. Awareness of the impact of training became heightened, the choice to train harder or longer having added implications in light of the need to be consistent; the benefits of frequency and consistency balanced against those of intensity and duration.

Challenges are part of my motivational repertoire – trying to go further or faster, or increasing rank on a Strava segment; chasing small milestones on the way to bigger things. Thirty days of running laid out a new template that came to define many periods of training; not necessarily optimal, but whenever motivation waned, effective. Forty kilometres of swimming in a week, fifteen in a day, forty days of cycling, or riding the length of a country in two weeks, the same pattern – a given workload in a given time. Simple, easily measured targets – how far, how often, or how long – no real pressure, just switch the brain off and train.

The concern, of course, is of injury or perhaps junk milage. Certainly injury is a genuine risk, any form of excessive overload can present it, and potentially this is excessive. I jump into a challenge carefully, when I feel I am ready, I measure out my effort over the timeframe, and I accept that at any sign of injury I will abandon my goal. And junk mileage? Sometimes the training is slow or easy, but it can be hard, or long, or any other combination that strains my body. There are quality sessions, and then on the days when I might have rested, I train again. There may be more effective, more targeted approaches, but when I am becoming bogged down in the minutia of a plan, this works – I can simply enjoy training; a few sessions that some might term ‘junk’ is a small price to pay for the overall gain.

So the first of April – a month of thirty days – in a year when, lets be honest, my motivation is not at its peak is the perfect time to play the game once more. Thirty runs of at least thirty minutes in thirty days. I will run every day in April, even a second weekend of birthday celebrations for my girlfriend didn’t stop me completing run number one; it was slow and I did have some concerns about my stomach, but I started as I mean to go on.

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Power, heart rate, cadence, speed, altitude – every second of every bike ride is recorded and logged. Analysis of cycling data is a staple of this site, so having condensed four years of run data into a single chart I inevitably turned my attention to the bike. Over the last few years the Performance Management Chart (PMC) has become an important part of how I track and manage my cycle training, at times becoming part of the planning process. Already familiar with the trends, comparing my fitness over four years felt more like an exercise in nostalgia.

Once again the blue line represent Chronic Training Load (CTL), or fitness; races are marked in red or green subjectively indicating whether I considered the bike successful or not. I should emphasise the subjectivity of those ratings, reviewing the chart now, a few days after I produced it, I realise that I may have been overly critical of both 2008 and 2009, particularly the latter half of 2009. Were all those races poor performances on the bike? Perhaps. My recollection, the nostalgic view, is that early 2010 was the turning point in my cycling, since then I’ve ridden well in three races. Also there is a distinction between being happy with the bike and being happy with the race – I struggled on the bike in Immenstadt, but ran superbly, a great day overall.

The background history is probably familiar by now (see the About Russell page if not). For half of 2008 work limited time for cycling, I manage a smooth and gradual rise in CTL through weekend long rides and evenings of hard turbo sessions. It culminated in June with my first Epic Camp; fatigue from this camp lingered and despite such a progressive, long build my performance failed to hit the mark. September onwards I was training full-time, living in Australia, it’s surprising to see how slowly I raised fitness; while I remember this period as bike focused, running was progressing faster. It’s a reality check as to how easy I was riding – long hours of training, but the intensity was often far too low, I stressed the body through duration.

A scattergun approach to Kona qualification worked in 2009 – I raced a lot and eventually qualified. However, despite some good races I never felt I rode my best that year, something was always missing. Early season was sabotaged by moving during my Ironman Australia taper and worse, a saddle sore, for Ironman Lanzarote. With nothing to show for six dedicated months I refocussed and turned things round. Training through Roth and into Ironman UK, I had two good races in a short space of time, and perhaps I am overly critical of my bike performances there; while I may not have performed exceptionally on the bike, even my first trip to Kona went well. Races in this period are more amber than red, not quite what I’d been hoping for, but far from write offs. 2009 was an important year for my cycling, the increased time and energy I’d focussed there was slowly paying off. Fitness had improved, but I still tended to ride too easily, excessively reliant on volume.

Volume continued to dominate early 2010, January’s length of New Zealand Epic Camp put over 2000km in my legs by the end of the month. The timing was perfect, another month of more focussed riding and I was happy with the resulting performance in Ironman New Zealand. A mixed year followed, but one that introduced changes to my training regime – a month in Lanzarote showed me how hard I could work during long rides and the months without running showed me the gains to be made with greater variety of cycling. There was a shift towards slightly shorter, more intensive rides – less overall stress per ride, but far more effective in combination.

I did little else, but cycle by these principles in 2011. Yet I only managed a single performance that pleased me. Self-sabotage. I did too much, my end of season fizzled as I peaked too soon, burning myself out in the Alps. Spent from seven months of hard work, training dwindle and race results dropped.

Which leads to today as I slowly pick myself back up and begin the build into a busy season. So was there anything to be gained from revisiting the past?

Despite my familiarity the process hasn’t been without merit; I’ve noticed shared themes between bike and run – the merits of simple, consistent training at a solid level of fitness, and how the highest peaks with great potential to bring me on are often the most destructive. More so, a lesson I can take back to my run training, the broadening of training sessions and increased intensity yielded good results without necessitating increases in my load. A reminder that it’s not just how much you stress the body, but how you stress it that matters.

I no longer have the luxury of unlimited training hours and I don’t need them. The changes I’ve seen over the last four years show me how much can be achieved with a varied, balanced plan; volume is needed in blocks, but it shouldn’t dominate the entire year. Occupying the middle ground can deliver the majority of fitness and performance gains I need.

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It was an innocent enough idea, struck by the speed with which I was regaining my run legs and having recently updated my training diary to include the missing six months of data, I wondered – what could it show me? I hadn’t anticipate the hours I’d lose sifting through my logs, trying different charts and looking for patterns. I wasn’t expecting a miraculous sign, but four years of logged runs must have something to say. Once I fired up Excel – actually it was already open, it always is – and started pulling in data from WKO+ my evenings were gone. I wanted to see what the last four years really looked like – a broad picture of how I’d actually trained.

Chronic Training Load (CTL) seemed a simple way to summarise such a long period. As one of the three elements in a Performance Management Chart (PMC), CTL is a proxy for fitness, combining the effect of intensity, duration and frequency of training; broadly as you work more your CTL will rise, you’re building fitness. In isolation it’s not necessarily a great indicator of performance, high CTL indicates high fitness and certainly the potential to perform at our best, but other factors come into play. While the PMC also attempts to model the impact of fatigue through Acute Training Load (ATL) and Training Stress Balance (TSB) I decided to focus on my level of fitness throughout each year. I was more interested in comparing the low, but rising fitness of the present day with seasons from the past.

A lot of training and a lot of racing. The rise and fall of the blue CTL line reflects the variation in run training, races are marked subjectively – green for a successful run, red for a poor performance. Each year is to the same scale, so the peak at the end of 2008 is of similar magnitude as that in mid-2010, what the graph doesn’t show is the exact nature of the build: in 2008 I incorporated brick runs after every bike in addition to regular run training, in 2010 I neglected cycling to run very high volumes.

The consistency of 2008 surprised me, for the first seven months I was working in London, it was easiest to fit running around my job, but when I left and travelled to Australia cycling dominated the schedule; that I carried consistency through to 2009 without significantly progressing fitness is a consequence of that bias. The turning point in 2009 was part consistency, but also changes in body composition – losing some ballast had a major impact on run performance.

From mid-2009 onwards I had a good run, a series of successfully executed races and a real sense of progress, but returning from New Zealand and ending my sabbatical brought it to an end. I’ll admit I didn’t enjoy the reality check and struggled to bring back good form; that year Lanzarote was raced on half-fitness and too much weight. I followed with that second major run peak, achieved off the back of too low a base (i.e. a period of low CTL, indicating relatively low levels of training). The rapidity with which I chased mileage targets made an overuse injury almost inevitable; it may have occurred after the fact, but the damage was likely done in that month of climbing CTL. Enough fitness to pull a good performance out for the ITU Long Distance Worlds, then it was downhill fast.

I was never run fit in 2011, not by the standards of previous years, but when you average ninety minutes running per week, it’s hard to be good at racing marathons. An initial attempt to build up running failed, by March my calf was causing me pain again, that was a key moment. I finally dealt with the issue. Rest, then analysis with Kinetic Revolution and a slow progression back to some run training. It held me together and slowly the calf was able to heal even when I hindered the process through races and training camps.

What can be learnt from the year? It doesn’t take huge fitness to run an Ironman, but it helps; it does require careful pacing when fitness isn’t there; and it definitely requires good bike fitness. More importantly – had I been as proactive back in 2010, my 2011 season might have been very different. Idle speculation of course.

I am recovered, free of pain and free of tension in the calf; I’m enjoying running again and finding that while I’m not as fit nor as light I feel more like the runner of 2008 than 2010. That’s progress. This brief review shows me that I don’t necessarily need to reach the greatest peaks to achieve the performances I want, but when I’ve been at those points my running steps up. What’s obvious is the application of work to achieve that level needs control – the chase of 2010 was a disaster, the more moderate build of 2008 worked. If I choose to place that focus on running again I have to adopt a cautious approach, growing fitness slowly and steadily; 2011 has left me with weak foundations.

Obviously I’ve produced a similar chart for cycling, there is more of this data trawl to come, and with greater detail I’ve delved further into broader topics. At the very least this process is a reminder of the value of patience and consistency in my progression as an athlete.

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