Tag Archives: endurance

Crunching the Numbers

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306.4

runners

 

Rule 34 states that ‘If it exists, there is porn of it.’  I believe that in the realm of health and fitness, if one person has had an idea, two other people have figured out how to count it, collate it, and quantify it.  One such idea is the Banister Impulse/Response model.  The idea was at first to figure out if, by recording all training efforts, an increase in fitness could be calculated by means of an ordinary differential equation and the answer given in the form of positive training effect, or PTE.  It almost worked.  For every positive training effect there is a negative effect, that being fatigue.  Rather than shoot down the original hypothesis however, this little fact seemed to have perfected it.  When the PTE is plotted against the NTE over time along with actual performance an interesting and quite repeatable effect is shown.

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Skipping all of the math, we see that at the beginning negative effects, basically fatigue, outweigh the positive effects of training.  As performance starts to improve the positive effects become substantially greater than the negative.  This model has been tested for many endeavors, running, cycling, swimming, and seems to work similarly in all of them.  More here.

 

I have a confession to make. I fell off the wagon, yes, stopped making fitness a priority and forgot about eating right and it got me. On top of not making weightloss goals and feeling pretty low from the lack of endorphins, I got a chronic hip pain. So I am back at square one, actually square zero, I have lost the ability to squat temporarily. I am slowly rehabbing the range of motion while I try to catch up in other areas.

It is iced tea season once again, there is 3 gallons of the stuff in the refrigerator right now, good hydration is one of the very basic things I am concentrating one as the summer progresses. Purging useless carbs, refined flour and sugar, and getting back to fresh greens and such. Baby steps, the goal is not a ‘diet’ but a lifestyle change, a permanent one.

Prying myself away from the computer screen is underway. Walking the dog a mile at a time, up to 3 times a week now to mobilize the hips and get the wind back. Weight training again starting with Bench, Deads, Lat pulldowns and Power cleans until the squat comes back.

Workout:

Dog walking= 1 mile, large dog, his pace not mine.

Food:

8 oz, sausage, 6 eggs Calories 1376 Protein 81.8 g. Fat 95.8 g. Carbs 0 g.

10 oz. Grd beef+ 2 med onions 518 cal Protein 45 g. Fat 31 g. Carbs 11 g.

Chinese buffet Don’t judge me.

 

Cardio-Like it Or Not

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bann1305#

As I have mentioned before, respiration is the primary mechanism for removing fat from the body. Cardio training is the best way of elevating respiration to a level that will effect this removal.

The best method I have come upon is HIIT, High Intensity Interval Training. The acronym may be new but the general principles remain the same, small sessions of extreme effort broken up by short rest periods. How does this work? A story to illustrate…

In 1954 Roger Bannister had decided to break the 4 minute mile. To do this he broke the race down into laps, 4 quarter mile segments. Each day that he trained he ran 10 quarter mile laps at a pace just under 1 minute each. By doing this he, in effect, ran two sub-4 minute miles every day for a month or more. His purpose in doing this was to engrain in his muscle memory the pace that he needed to maintain in order to achieve his goal. At a track in Oxford on May 6, 1954 he finished the mile in 3:59.4.

HIIT works by elevating resting metabolism beyond the amount of time that you actually exercise. If your workout is 30 minutes long you don’t have to workout at maximum intensity for the whole 30 minutes, the work/rest cycle follows the formula ‘2x’ on/’x’ off, typically 30 seconds work followed by 15 seconds rest repeated 10 times without stopping or some variation. Movements that lend themselves to this model are sprints(run a distance and walk back), burpees, box jumps, jump rope, bear crawls, tire flipping, you get the picture.

My workout today was a 1 mile run, in 15:38. Before you average guys(5’10”, 150#) start talking smack, think about this, I weigh in at 305, if you think you can run a quarter of that with a 155# barbell on your back then good on you. Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither was my ‘ab’ but I’m working on it.

Countdown to the Hotter’n Hell 100…

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The big endurance ride of the year is only a hundred days or so out now, time to fine tune the bike and get some serious saddle time, this is the year we go for the big one, the hundred mile course.  And we are going to do it with a team of at least 5 people, so we have to be serious about our cadence and especially our rest stop discipline.  We cannot stop every 10 miles or even 20 like in years past, the cutoff for the 100 mile course is closed at 11:30AM or earlier, depending on the weather, which gives us about 4 hours to get the first 70 miles done making ‘Hell’s Gate’ before the cutoff.

We all have camelbacks and know how to use them, we should probably try to make the first stop at 50 miles, somewhere to the west of Burkburnett on the way back from Electra.  Getting 5 people to adhere to that sort of schedule will be tough but the alternative is to leave the stragglers behind and go for the gate without them.  The start will include about 14,000 cyclists and we will start in front of maybe 12,000 but still, passing up the first three rest stops should seriously thin the herd in front of us so that when we do stop the lines will not be as long, keeping stops short is key though.  Rest is for after the ride, stopping is for hydration only, and then back up and ride.  Since we rode together last year I know that we have 3 strong riders and me and the rest can keep up, practicing taking the lead and rotating through the pack practice would help us immensely, both with drafting and keeping our minds off of the road and the monotony of pedalling, which can be mentally draining especially into the wind.

It will be interesting to see if my training this year will serve me as it has in the past, I am getting better at hydration too, I think, which should serve me extremely well, we are due a real scorcher, the last two years were pretty mild for the end of August(the ride is always exactly 9 days before Labor Day).  I have been drinking at least a gallon and a half of liquid a day, some days two, this seems about right as the temperatures here are in the 100’s most days and I work outside in it all day.

I plan on taking as much advantage as I can of the community rides we have here every day and getting out on the bike trails as much as I can, I have to wear in the new Brooks before August.  Yall be good and watch for cyclists when you drive.