Intelligent Triathlon Talk, Issue #005 -<<FIRST_NAME_OF_SUBSCRIBER>>,Simple Way To Improve Your Run

Intelligent Triathlon Talk

20th December 2011, Issue No 5.

Welcome to Intelligent Triathlon Talk.

In this issue:

News Update: Mark's squad responds to swim camp
Training Advice: Simple way to improve your running
New On The Site: Ironman programme and triathlete interviews

Mark's Squad News

(Mark is Performance Coach for British Triathlon’s High Performance Centre in Loughborough.)

If you read our last newsletter (you can get back issues here), you will remember that Mark's squad was heading off on a swim-focussed training camp.

The good news is, the camp worked! Everyone’s time trial performance improved with most setting best times – over 50, 200 and 800m. The trick after that was to hold onto the improved swim performance whilst returning to a conventional 3 discipline programme. As we sit here now in late December everybody has, so we can count this as a step forwards for everyone.

The weakest swimmers in the squad are now swimming 30s per 800m faster than they were before, with everyone inside 10:20, and the fastest athlete hitting 9:30 for 800m.

Miles on the bike have increased in the lead up to Christmas, with the first serious long rides kicking off with a one-way ride from the Peak District back to Loughborough (140km), where we went through snow, hail, rain and sunshine!

After a good 10 weeks training since the start of the 2012 training season everyone is looking forward to a little break between Christmas and New Year (they’ll still train most days, just a bit more low key!), and are looking forward to a 3 week training camp in Spain in early January.

Training Tip Of The Month

For those who have started to build a good base of running, remember that you can include hills in any run session even your quality sessions, where you need to remember to work the downhill as well as uphill.

The hills don’t need to be steep, just a change in gradient will do. This is because running hills helps to improve muscle-tendon elasticity for improved running economy.

It also helps increase strength and there is a technical value in that lots of people can’t run fast downhill so this could gain you time in a race.

Secondly, consistency is key to effective training.

It easy to push a bit too hard in winter, thinking every session matters. It doesn’t at this time of year. Better to miss a session or have extra rest and live to fight another day than run yourself into the ground and miss weeks of training recovering. Listen to your body and make rational, not emotional decisions.

New On The Website

Since the last newsletter we have added several pages:

21 week Ironman programme

Triathlon cycling shoes

We’ve also been busy interviewing. There are now interviews with elite GB triathletes Liz Blatchford and her coach Ben Bright, and Will Clarke (his coach, Michelle Dillon is currently on honeymoon and will be answering questions when she returns!).

US triathlete Sarah Haskins and coach Nate Korteum are up next, and we will continue adding to this section of the site. You can read all the interviews here.

There are also more training camps in our directory, so check it out if you're thinking about going on a camp in 2012.

Ask the Coach

Got a question for us? Submit it to the website and check out other people’s questions - and our answers.

Coming Up

Mark is working on putting together some recommendations of tri bikes, so that info will be on our site in the next few weeks.

In the next edition of our newsletter we will give you an example training week from Mark’s camp in Spain.

To keep up to date with every new page on the site subscribe to our RSS feed or ‘like’ us on Facebook.

If you like this e-zine, please forward it to fellow triathletes who you think might be interested. If a friend did forward this to you and if you like what you read, please subscribe by visiting this page. By doing so you'll also receive a copy of our free triathlon training planner.

Comments? Ideas? Feedback? We’d love to hear from you. Please contact us.

See you next time and happy Christmas to you all!

Rhona & Mark