Sleep is For Wimps
It’s the beginning of May and I have one last easy week before all hell breaks loose. I am staring down the barrel of 7 consecutive hard weeks, where I over-load myself with both intensity and distance, followed by a 2 week taper, then the double in Quebec. Basically all the training I do up to this point is to prepare myself for surviving the next 7 weeks. Sometimes this phase is 6 weeks; sometimes it is 3 hard weeks, one slightly less hard week, and then 3 more hard weeks. This year, due to the random nature of when I started training in earnest in November, it worked out to 7 weeks.
So, is there any physiological basis for this? I doubt it. I recall, however, that Dave Scott used to leave home for 6 weeks and do something similar to prepare for Hawaii. Unfortunately, I have to do this at home and my capacity for logging excessive miles is hampered by the need to earn a living. Instead I substitute even more intensity for miles, day after day after day. If I don’t breakdown, I emerge on the other side a much tougher athlete. The good news is that during this pause the expectations for me to contribute to the functioning of the household go from low to zero. I have to do a lot of sucking up after this.
I’ve found that sleep becomes very expensive during these weeks and is traded at the margin like a scarce and valuable commodity. A typical evening conversation may go like this:” I need to sleep now. I will give you $20 to get coffee ready for the morning. Five extra minutes of sleep is worth that much to me.”
It’s a bit of a relief during the final 2 months to stop holding back. Prior to this point there really is a fuzzy thought process that which allows me to keep something in the tank for the final push. From this point forward, however, I can relinquish this burden and let my alter-ego Stimpy make most of the training decisions. Don’t try this at home: give virtual power of attorney to an overweight cartoon cat with a happy helmet. Back in my salad days, another athlete wanted to engage me in a detailed discussion about my “inner demons”. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my inner demon lives with a chihuahua named Ren Hoek and a collection of magic nose-goblins.
These weeks are crucial for me mentally and, to a lesser extent, physically to survive the meat grinder that is a double iron race. There isn’t exactly a text book on how to prepare for this. So much of the effort is mental. Flogging myself day after day for 6 or 7 weeks seems to be the only way to prepare for the relentless pounding I have to take during the race. I have another crack pot theory: that the body can take just about any training load for 6 or 7 weeks. In any case, I take a bit of joy in the age of power meters, heart rate zones, and certified on-line coaches with mountains of liability insurance to indulge myself in one last bit my iconoclastic behavior. I just hope it works otherwise I will look really stupid.
But it takes a lot of suffering just to get to this point. Since November, I re-learned a few lessons. First and foremost is the value of consistency. My weekly long run went to a minimum of 20 miles and sometimes touched on 22 or 23. My weekly, long bike stabilized at 3 hours, indoors, of course. I rarely missed my 2 night a week on the track, pounding out 300m to 1000m repeats. The same can be said for the Friday am bike-run. One thing that I try to impart on those I coach (or coached…I’m working very hard to not be coaching anyone) is that there is no silver bullet. No training camp, single workout, new diet, new heart rate zone is going to yield overnight results. The only thing that works is consistent work, week in and week out.
By the end of April, despite all the crap I ate on the randonneuring rides my weight stabilized in the 140-141 range. Somehow I completed another contract project in March but I can’t understand how this happened. Did I find any serenity during the training? Not really during any one moment but I found that rhythm of training was soothing. Rather, the rhythm of life around training was soothing: sleep, train, work, train, back to work, train, and sleep.
In other news, the swim class instructor, who lives a couple of doors down from me (and kicked me out for not learning another stroke), was hit by a car on his bike. He broke his collarbone and a couple of ribs as well as collecting a lot of road rash and I have an air-tight alibi. He was in the paper and on the television news. I dropped off a bottle of wine when he came home from the hospital. I’m sure that when the wine and painkillers kick in he will be in the news again: “Nude man in Armed stand off with Police”.
So, is there any physiological basis for this? I doubt it. I recall, however, that Dave Scott used to leave home for 6 weeks and do something similar to prepare for Hawaii. Unfortunately, I have to do this at home and my capacity for logging excessive miles is hampered by the need to earn a living. Instead I substitute even more intensity for miles, day after day after day. If I don’t breakdown, I emerge on the other side a much tougher athlete. The good news is that during this pause the expectations for me to contribute to the functioning of the household go from low to zero. I have to do a lot of sucking up after this.
I’ve found that sleep becomes very expensive during these weeks and is traded at the margin like a scarce and valuable commodity. A typical evening conversation may go like this:” I need to sleep now. I will give you $20 to get coffee ready for the morning. Five extra minutes of sleep is worth that much to me.”
It’s a bit of a relief during the final 2 months to stop holding back. Prior to this point there really is a fuzzy thought process that which allows me to keep something in the tank for the final push. From this point forward, however, I can relinquish this burden and let my alter-ego Stimpy make most of the training decisions. Don’t try this at home: give virtual power of attorney to an overweight cartoon cat with a happy helmet. Back in my salad days, another athlete wanted to engage me in a detailed discussion about my “inner demons”. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my inner demon lives with a chihuahua named Ren Hoek and a collection of magic nose-goblins.
These weeks are crucial for me mentally and, to a lesser extent, physically to survive the meat grinder that is a double iron race. There isn’t exactly a text book on how to prepare for this. So much of the effort is mental. Flogging myself day after day for 6 or 7 weeks seems to be the only way to prepare for the relentless pounding I have to take during the race. I have another crack pot theory: that the body can take just about any training load for 6 or 7 weeks. In any case, I take a bit of joy in the age of power meters, heart rate zones, and certified on-line coaches with mountains of liability insurance to indulge myself in one last bit my iconoclastic behavior. I just hope it works otherwise I will look really stupid.
But it takes a lot of suffering just to get to this point. Since November, I re-learned a few lessons. First and foremost is the value of consistency. My weekly long run went to a minimum of 20 miles and sometimes touched on 22 or 23. My weekly, long bike stabilized at 3 hours, indoors, of course. I rarely missed my 2 night a week on the track, pounding out 300m to 1000m repeats. The same can be said for the Friday am bike-run. One thing that I try to impart on those I coach (or coached…I’m working very hard to not be coaching anyone) is that there is no silver bullet. No training camp, single workout, new diet, new heart rate zone is going to yield overnight results. The only thing that works is consistent work, week in and week out.
By the end of April, despite all the crap I ate on the randonneuring rides my weight stabilized in the 140-141 range. Somehow I completed another contract project in March but I can’t understand how this happened. Did I find any serenity during the training? Not really during any one moment but I found that rhythm of training was soothing. Rather, the rhythm of life around training was soothing: sleep, train, work, train, back to work, train, and sleep.
In other news, the swim class instructor, who lives a couple of doors down from me (and kicked me out for not learning another stroke), was hit by a car on his bike. He broke his collarbone and a couple of ribs as well as collecting a lot of road rash and I have an air-tight alibi. He was in the paper and on the television news. I dropped off a bottle of wine when he came home from the hospital. I’m sure that when the wine and painkillers kick in he will be in the news again: “Nude man in Armed stand off with Police”.
posted by Stimpy at 8:40 a.m.
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