Reality Check

As an endurance athlete you are faced with long training days week after week and month after month. You often feel tired and can question the wisdom of another workout. Generally, more is better unless your body stops adapting to the stress. The question is, how do you know if you are adapting to the stress and if you are doing the correct type of training to make you faster?

One way to get feedback on your fitness is a time trial. Another way is a standard workout that you can compare to previous weeks. Here are a few samples that are tried and true:

Swim 10 x 100 yards
Bike 10 x 1 mile
Run 10 x 400 yards (typically on a track)

You should allow your heart rate to drop 110-120 bpm or your zone 1 before starting the next hard effort.

These are basic workouts that will serve as reality checks. Not only will they give you a true measure of your fitness, they will make you faster as well.

The main difference between racing and doing intervals is the added bonus that the workouts give you by increasing your speed. Often times races are too long and too hard to make you faster. Racing teaches your body to move at your current race pace, but what you want to do is teach your body to move faster than your current race pace. The end result is that you keep lowering your race PR.

A good example of this is an Olympic marathoner – he doesn’t race marathons to get faster at marathons; he races 5k’s and 10k’s. The same holds true at all distances.

Use these workouts to gauge your fitness and go faster!

Coach Lee
PRTriCoach.com