Running and the 10% Rule

by Dave Slavinski

AS THE new season begins and you have a renewed sense of determination to reach or exceed your personal best times or to reach the new goals for the new season, you need to approach your training with a bit of restraint. Triathlon training, especially when it comes to running, requires an approach that is calculated, measured, and designed to help preserve your health and improve your fitness over a period of months and years. YES, I said it, YEARS! But don’t let that scare you as this is a healthy sport meant to improve your longevity and keep you young, so you will be doing it for years and during this time you should get faster!

Running is the sport in triathlon that causes the most preventable injuries. While cycling accidents can be more dramatic and cause more damage, running injuries are more frequent because they are over use injuries that are many times avoidable if we would only take the training in a more measured way or if we treat the small issues before they become big problems. There is also a correlation between weight and impact injuries. The lighter you are, the less impact injuries you will have in most cases. This is a double-edged sword as the best way to lose weight is through running. It is both time and cost efficient. Many people avoid running for this exact reason, but us runners understand the overall benefits of run fitness. 

One of the rules that we must follow is the 10% rule. With running you should not increase your mileage/time by more then 10% at a time. This doesn’t mean it is safe to increase your mileage by 10% every week, rather increase by this rate only after you make the physical adaptations to the stress and strain. This is normally 14+ day cycle. In short increase, make the time or mileage increase every third week and you will be safer then making quick and dramatic increases. Longevity is the goal, so don’t rush. Be patient and look at the big picture. Once you can run for 6-8 weeks at a mileage that is 20-30% higher then when you started you can increase again. But heed the warning, listen to your body, it will tell you when you have reached your peak mileage. Work smart as the progress you make should be steady and incremental throughout the year as well as over the course of multiple seasons. It does little good to run a few big weeks and then have to take time off. You are better off running a little less each week and getting 45+ weeks of running under your belt each year.  

Early Season Training Tips

Early Season Workouts:

by Dave Slavinski

Early season isn’t the time for fast track workouts or crushing bike and pool workouts. It is the time for strength training and getting proper swim, bike, and run form. This consists of hill-bounding drills, hill running, soft sand beach runs, low cadence bike rides, one-legged bike drills, swimming with paddles, and lots of form drills in the water and on the bike or even a bike fitting. The goal of the winter is to prepare for the “real” training in the spring and the racing of the summer while becoming more efficient, more comfortable, and stronger so you can avoid the physical breakdowns of a long season. 

Why not just go crazy all season long with track, pool, and bike workouts? The basic answer lies in physiology. First of all, you need to build a base both muscularly and cardiovascularly. Going a little longer each week in each discipline at a moderate to easy tempo will accomplish that. Combining more strength work with this will help you make gains when you add tempo and threshold workouts later in the spring. Moreover, the benefits of threshold/ anaerobic workouts will only get you short term gains. These gains may last a few months, but there will be a plateau and then a slow decline in fitness and performance especially since may of us push the fine line between threshold and anaerobic workouts. So save threshold work until April if your “A” race is August or later in the season, or start earlier if your big race is in June. But be prepared for the plateau later in the summer if you are doing an early season race. In short, go a little longer each week and keep your workouts in the endurance and tempo speed zones during the early season. Add speed and intensity later in the season, and pure speed at the end to achieve your best results. 

Strength training is another key. For me, this is not doing bench presses or working on the machines at the gym but rather working with body weight, kettle bells, stability and Bosu balls and medicine balls. Very basic movements add up to one heck of a workout and they provide more for you then bench press strength. These provide core strength, working on the abs, back, shoulders and hips and other stabilizer muscles. These are the muscles that aid in every movement your body makes during triathlon and when they are weak you get injuries elsewhere that can be prevented. Two workouts weekly during the early part of the season and one weekly workout each week during the peak season will help you stay strong and injury free.

There is as much art as there is science when it comes to training. BPC uses Raceday to chart fitness and fatigue levels so we know how to train you using the science. Following the basic guidelines listed above is a good start if you are training yourself, but if you are looking to take your racing to another level using our creative coaching feel free to reach out to us for help.....that’s what we do! 

Run Cadence



Run Cadence and Stride Length

By: Dave Slavinski

Running is the most important part of triathlon and there are no short-cuts to becoming a better runner. This being said, there are plenty of training techniques that you can implement to become a better, faster runner. The one piece I have noticed to be the most prevalent is cadence as related to stride length as related to running. 

To begin the cadence discussion I must confess that I am not a believer in whole-sale changes to running form. There are times I have tinkered with run form to avoid the re-occuring injuries I have experienced throughout my career with some degree of success. I even tinker with it on the track during certain workouts depending on how I feel and how fast I need to be running. But there is no clear evidence that one running style or method works best for everyone. You have a style and you can make subtle changes which will make you faster or less apt to injury, but without getting into a debate we will avoid saying that these changes will make you more “efficient.” 

We have to understand a few simple rules before we combat cadence head-on. #1: when your body does work we refer to it as wattage. You have certain wattage capacities for swimming, biking, and running. With swimming and running we can determine wattage by speed most of the time, especially when we are running on a track or a relatively flat surface and it is easy to determine swim wattage through the use of a pool. But with cycling we cannot determine wattage through speed as the course we ride is always changing. These changes are not only the hills but also by wind conditions and aerodynamics of the rider’s position and the aerodynamics of the bike.  Therefore we implement the power meter and ignore speed almost all together.

#2: You will ALWAYS use more watts running then riding. On a bike you are exerting the large majority of  your wattage on the downstroke despite your style of pedaling while on the run you are absorbing the shock of landing (using energy ie. wattage) and toeing off simultaniously, thus using more energy or watts. 

Cadence on the run is similar to the bike in many ways. You will go faster on a bike if you can turn a bigger gear at the same cadence.....simple fact. You will be a faster runner if you increase the stride length at the same cadence....another simple fact. The more ground you cover with each step, the faster you are going. Easier said then done though. How do you accomplish this?

First, you run across your training zones. Some days you will run easy/endurance runs. Add some tempo runs at a faster pace and you will get stronger. Push your aerobic threshold (AT) on the track once a week or even push your aerobic capacity with VO2 max efforts. That is where good coaching comes in. A good coach will guide you across these zones and with accurate athlete feedback a coach will turn the science into art by adjusting these workouts so you maximize your potential.

Second, there are a few simple alterations you can make to your running form to improve your stride length and get the proper foot position. Practice the snap or the downstroke. We all too often think about running as the extension or knee-drive. How often have you heard a coach yell “drive your knees!” I am here to tell you that they are dead wrong! It is quite the opposite in fact. Snap your legs under your body. Driving the knees without the snap leads to over-striding and the use of extra wattage (loss of energy) as you recover from what running coaches call “stepping in the bucket.” This happens when you increase your stride length to the point that you are impacting the ground with your foot well in front of your hips causing you to apply the breaks each time your foot hits the ground. You then have to pull your hips and torso over the foot and attempt to propel forward from a negative position. It is slow and requires MORE energy then someone who has better form. 

To make slow and subtle changes to your form you should begin before you start running. Get them mind and the body into the act together. Hold on to a railing, fence, or wall and practice pulling your leg trough the bottom of the run stroke. You will need to lean forward slightly to achieve the optimal body position and you will concentrate on placing your foot under your hip, thus needing something to lean on. Do 30-seconds on each leg before you begin running. Each time you practice this you will be able to hold this form a little longer. You may only be able to hold it for 3-minutes on the 1st run. Fine, start from the beginning and work into it. You are re-training your body and your muscles and it will take time. Before you know it you will be a different runner altogether. 

Here is the part you have been waiting for, the toe off. This is the piece that will subtract the most time from your 5k! Sprinters have been told to roll their toes UP since the beginning of time, but they forgot to tell distance runners about this. The best distance runners do this naturally and without realizing that they even do it. Wearing a GPS/Heart Rate Monitor is a great tool for quantifying this part of your run form. I was able to maintain a 10-second per mile faster pace at the same HR be simply rolling my toes up. It seems counterintuitive in some respects but when you look more closely it makes perfect sense without all of the science. We have already concluded that you use more watts running. You require wattage use for landing and propelling forward. If you can reduce the watts required for landing, you have more left for proplson. That is, if you are pushing your toes down as you attempt to roll from heal or mid-foot to your toes there is actually a breaking sensation occuring. You have taken a rounded object (you foot) and curved the end part (your toes) down creating MORE impact and requiring more wattage to be exerted to make up for this sudden impact. The faster you are attempting to run the more pronounced this negative effect is. 

Through some careful inspection and interspection I know that no matter what the slope is may cadence remains constant. Uphill, downhill, at 7-minute pace or 5-minute pace my cadence remains relatively constant. What does change? Stride length.

Thus, through a slightly forward body lean, a reduced impact on the ground by pulling your leg through the bottom of your run stroke, and the rolling up of the toes, (plus track and distance training) you will become a faster runner. There is no “magic bullet” when it comes to running unfortunately, it is earned through hours and countless hours of running and it is not through increased cadence, but rather by reducing the amount of energy your body wastes impacting the ground that will help make you faster. This reduction of energy will allow you to increase your stride length slightly with the proper body lean and allow you to cover more ground with the same cadence and at the same wattage. 

How to Train this Winter!



What to do this winter!

With snow on the ground and the threat of more to come, what do you do as a triathlete? Here are a few things to consider this winter.

1. Concentrate on your core: Take classes working with kettlebells, stability balls, Bosu balls, TRX bands. Therapeutic Fitness offers courses where we work on muscles that you never knew you had.
2. Swim: The pool is always open and there is never snow to contend with. Get an extra day in the pool and you wont have to work as hard when the temps hit 70 and you are dying to be outside running or on the bike. 
3. Spin: Bike strength is important to a good triathlon and knowing your body is the key. Go get a good trainer and ride YOUR bike this winter. Find a class and spend time getting know understand cadence, wattage, and heart rate and build your strength for the 2011 season. We are offering 2 classes every week this winter http://www.brielleperformancecenter.com/schedule.php
4. Run: If you are lucky enough to live near the beach, run on the beach. When it snows the beach is clear, at least down past the high tide line. Salt water and snow don’t mix so there are always clear spots to run in the sand. If you aren’t so lucky, run on the treadmill. Be careful though! Raise the incline to 1-2% and don’t log too many miles on the thing. I can’t stand more than 40-minutes and I feel it in my knees and hips the following day. You can break up the running on the treadmill with some runs on the elliptical trainer as well so you can avoid the impact. 
5. Have Fun: Go out and walk in the snow, snow shoe, take the kids sleigh riding, mountain bike when the snow clears up. You need to change things up and enjoy the journey. Don’t get caught up in the “I need to do.... in order to ......” Gain fitness while having fun!

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