Beginning Marathon Tips

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Twice this year I was asked for some tips by some people running their first marathons. This is what I sent them:
1. It is important that you run 3-4 times a week. 2 is the barest minimum and may mean you will have a painful race.
A nice schedule is 3x a week with cross training in between, like cycling or swimming. If you can tolerate one more, then you can add that in.
2. Generally you run 2 shorter workouts and then have a long run.
3. If you are not running interval, hill, or threshold workouts for your 2 shorter workouts, i would advise you to gradually build from 30 min up to 1.25 hour running for your shorter runs. You will need to substitute longer endurance type workouts for the typical threshold workouts.
4. On the long runs, you should build weekly about 10% in miles. For me, i use time as a metric for training and increase my runs about 15 minutes every week.
5. When you peak for a marathon, you should do a minimum of 2, hopefully 3 at 20+ miles. If you can get to 22-24 miles it will be great training not only for endurance, but for mental training in how your brain deals with being out there so long. One 20+ miler is bare minimum.
6. You should consider a run-walk strategy for the race. I ran my first NYC marathon with a 5 min run :30 walk strategy and it got me in at 5 hours 19 minutes.
If you choose this, you should think about training this way also, so you can get used to running with walk breaks.
7. Somewhere between mile 14 and mile 20, most runners experience the “wall”. This is where your body seems to slow down and you’re feel like you’re moving through molasses, and its hard to go faster. You may experience a mental urge to just quit or slow down and just walk. This is the “wall”. During training, you should train within this mileage towards your peak to train your body and mind to deal with working through the “wall”. However, note that if you break through the wall, everyone typically experiences new found energy and you can run to the finish. So whatever you do, DON’T QUIT when you experience the wall. Keep moving!
8. You should practice hydration during your training runs.
you should consider getting one of these:
Fuel Belt Enduranace 4-Bottle Belt
and then get some bigger bottles:
Fuel Belt 10 oz Super Flask 2-pack
I typically go through 4 10 oz bottles of fluid during a race, for a 4 hour marathon. this varies greatly on temperatures. I have started drinking more from aid stations so nowadays I only take 2 10 oz bottles with me and just drink along the way.
Then you should get some extra pockets to hold your gels:
Fuel Belt Pockets
You should also pick a good sports drink to drink during the race. I use First Endurance EFS (http://www.trisports.com/1stendurancee3.html) because it has a lot of electrolytes and also some protein. But most importantly, it is whey protein as soy protein has been known to cause stomach problems. You can get EFS from Helen’s Cycles on Lincoln in Marina Del Rey. There is another store in Santa Monica. Or order it here at trisports.com
9. You should practice fueling during training. I am a big user of PowerGels because they have a higher electrolyte component, plus I can get some with caffeine for an added kick towards the end of a run race.
But caffeinated gels once threw my stomach into a churn and so I take it sparingly but like the extra kick it gives, but only take it during the last 1/3 of a marathon.
Other gels also work well. You just need to find what your stomach is OK with.
You’ll probably want to take one about 10 min before the race starts and wash it down with some fluid. Then you should take one gel every 45-60 min, and take a sip of fluid right after. You should start fueling as soon as the race starts.
Do not let your body get into a depleted state! You won’t be able to pull out of it. The body simply cannot work fast enough to replenish your energy stores. Generally, when you race, you’re burning more energy than you can take in and process. So it’s impossible to replace it all and don’t try. Just keep as much as you can going in with the gels and sports drink.
Your body is working hard to keep you going with your athletic activity and is not devoting much resources to digestion. Thus, training will help your body prepare for a long, hard effort but it cannot supply all the energy it needs. Gels and what you get in an energy drink are the easiest to absorb that do not require much from your stomach to do so. But even that has a limit to what it can absorb per hour. Taking more than that can mean some severe gastrointestinal problems, like vomiting, stomach ache, or diarrhea.
Trust me i’ve been there before and it is the worst feeling to have stomach problems during a race, besides the fact that squating on a port-a-potty is just gross anyways.
What’s even worse is to bonk. This is when you’ve sucked all the glycogen out of your muscles and you have nothing left, and you cant replace it either through fueling. It’s the worst feeling ever and you just feel like quitting. You may not even be able to run after you bonk.
10. Lubrication is a good thing to put on. You never know when you get chafing or blisters.
For chafing, i use Bodyglide. For my feet, i use Blistershield roll-on. see all of it here:
Lubricants
Pre-race and during training, rub bodyglide on inside of your upper arms and along your ribs and lats where your swinging arms will rub. Guys get nipple burn but I usually don’t hear women getting it, but I rub it on my nipples. I usually only put on lube for training runs longer than about 1.25 hours. Below that, it usually isn’t a problem.
I wear these socks to prevent blisters:
WrightSock
But i have found that my form is more predictive of blisters than socks. So in changing/correcting my footstrike to the ground, I have found that I have substantially reduced the chance of blisters, in addition to using Blistershield lube.
11. Another thing you may experience is sore biceps. This is from simply holding your arms up for such a long time. So watch out for this when you train and get used to holding your arms up that long. Learn to relax the whole way and shake out your arms occasionally.
12. Marathon taper is typically about two weeks. You do one more long run/high volume week two weeks before the race and then take two weeks to taper. I would not advise you to do a long run one week before. Experienced athletes are ok with this, but for beginners it’s better that you not overtrain, and that you arrive fresh and uninjured on race day.
13. I gave you some DVDs. i think the Pose Method stuff is a bit hokey, but definitely practicing balance by standing on one leg is a good thing. Running on the balls of my feet have eliminated knee problems although it took literally years for my calves to adapt to the stress. Only recently have they not protested in the early season after coming off the off season. ChiRunning is pretty good. Evolution Running was additive although I felt that I learned the most from ChiRunning and Pose.
14. As we mentioned, running into a headwind stinks. Try to find somebody to run behind. You are basically drafting behind.
15. Interval training is great. It allows you to create situations where you can adapt to higher stresses, which equate to handling tough conditions during races. But it is done with short bursts as training at super high intensities for too long, over too long a period of time will only lead to injury and overtraining. So here is one interval sequence that involves neuromuscular training. You should strive to do this sequence every week if possible.
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Neuromuscular training
Description: use of super short intervals, with full recovery in between, but at super high intensity, will train your neuromuscular system to adapt to high efforts, whether they are high speed or high effort or both. Then slower speeds or lower effort will feel almost easy. But most importantly, it trains your neuromuscular system to fire neurons (to make the muscles move) faster and not to tire from simply the effort of firing. This is a source of fatigue and is easily eliminated by workouts like these. These are best done on a treadmill where the relentless nature of the treadmill forces you to keep up or else you’ll fly off the back (but please don’t!). The treadmill can also be cranked up to speeds that one would normally not be able to achieve, but eventually can adapt to. This will lead to faster speeds overall which may be hard to get to if only doing road or track work.
WORKOUT 1: Discover your workout speed or workout effort
Warm up with this sequence:
4 min easy jog, whatever speed works. For me that is 4 MPH.
Then, do this cycle with each time increasing the speed by .5 MPH:
30 sec @ Speed, then 30 sec rest back to your jog speed.
Keep increasing the speed until you find that it is almost too hard to keep up, but not so hard that you cannot. You may find that you will pass the speed you should be working out at where you will find it took everything you had to just hold on for 30 seconds, which is OK, so make your workout speed .5 MPH less than that number.
Once you find that speed, then if you don’t feel too tired, run another 2 intervals at that speed:
:30 @ X MPH, then rest for 1:00 in between intervals.
WORKOUTS AFTER 1: increase the number of times you can repeat speed X for :30, with rest interval of 1:00
Warm up again, 4 min easy jog, then do 30 sec @ speed with 30 sec rest. Increase speed by .5 MPH each time until you hit X MPH. Then take a 1.5 min easy jog.
Start with 4 repeats at :30 @ X MPH, with rest interval of 1:00
Then each workout time afterwards, try to increase by one more repeat. So next workout 5 repeats at :30 @ X MPH, with rest interval of 1:00, then 6 x :30 @ X MPH, RI 1:00, then 7 x :30 @ X MPH, RI 1:00, etc. If you cannot add one more repeat, then just stop at the previous number of repeats.
Total time for these workouts is less than 20 min usually.
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16. The typical marathon before and race day looks like this for me:
Day before:
No training. Check into the race, get your race materials. Make sure you have enough supplies: Clothes, shoes, sports drinks, gels, etc. I also like to buy whatever it is I’m going to eat tomorrow morning.
Prepare everything you’re going to race with on the floor. I put my running shoes, hat, sunglasses, shirt, tights or pants, socks, etc. all on the floor and lay it out. I stick gels in my fuel belt. I pin my race number to my shirt or use a race number belt.
That night I eat a big pasta dinner. There is some evidence that you should eat a pasta dinner 2 nights before. I personally like to do both if possible. I think just the night before is probably enough. If it’s going to be a warm day, i may also toss salt on the pasta to help with electrolyte loading.
Then i go sit on the toilet and try to crap as much out as possible. I know this sounds bad, but you don’t want to go and crap out on the race course. It’s the worst feeling.
Morning of Race:
I like to get up about 3 hours before race start. As soon as i get up, I start eating my breakfast and get dressed. My typical breakfast is a hard boiled egg and maybe 1/4 of a bagel, plus a glass of sports recovery drink. This is to carbo load one last time before the race but with something that doesn’t upset my stomach. As soon as I finish eating, I go sit on the toilet and try to crap one more time.
I usually try to wear something warm as mornings can be cool depending on where you race. I bring a small pack with me to stuff everything in. Sometimes races will give you a plastic bag. In any case, whatever you bring you should mark it with your name and race number. I also bring a small plastic bottle of water with me, and one gel.
Then I get down to race start. For a marathon, there is usually a truck where you can hand in your backpack or bag of stuff. Thus you can arrive with warm clothes and then take them off and put them in a bag or pack and hand it to the truck guy. The truck then carries all the racer’s bags/packs to the finish line where you can pick it up. I stretch and warmup about 30 min before race start. I will run some light short reps back and forth to get my blood going. About 10 min before race i take the gel and sip some water. I try not to drink too much water or else i have to go to the bathroom.
17. Recovery is so important. It’s probably the least understood aspect of training. You need to rest your body and brain enough so that you can recover and grow for your next workout. Thus, triathletes are in a constant state of body breakdown and it takes time to adapt to daily stress over a period of 6 straight days of workouts, including double workouts (or triple) on some days. Most people don’t rest enough and this can cause dwindling performance and lead to injury and overtraining.
I think you should run 3 days per week with rest days in between, or recovery workouts in between. By recovery workout, i mean you can pedal on a bike or Lifecycle gently for about 20-30 min to help flush out bad stuff in your muscles and bring new nutrients in. Swimming is also a good recovery workout if you don’t swim hard. Also, I think you should not run the day after your long run. I think you’ll reach a mileage that you’ll find you’re fairly sore the day after. So take the day off!
You know I’m a fan of ice baths so they help remove soreness, help flush out bad stuff, and get new nutrients into muscles. Since you’re right by the beach, you could probably even just walk into the surf up to your upper thighs for about 10 minutes, since the surf is pretty cold.
Also, if you find that you are still very sore on the day after your rest day, take the day off also. Do not be afraid to take an extra day!
During the long training periods of ironman for me, I take one full day off, then the next day i can only do a recovery run and swim. Then on the second day after, I usually do a bike recovery workout. It’s only on the third day that I am back to being able to do a full effort workout. Before that it’s impossible. So I just accept that fact and rest that long. If I don’t, I could get injured and definitely would be pushing my body beyond what it is capable of absorbing at that moment. There was a time when I was pushing very hard and recovery even spilled into the third day and it was on the fourth day that I could finally do a full effort workout. It was only when I discovered protein powder that it almost brought my recovery back by a whopping full 2 days!
18. Eating is important. Your body needs calories to perform. It will not be able to do so on what you have stored in your body right now. That is because 1) the fat that is stored in your body is not easily accessible to heavy activity, and 2) your body has not stored enough glycogen in the muscles because you haven’t trained enough yet, and 3) your body has not yet developed the ability to convert the fat in your body to glycogen. So you should eat afterwards both in protein (to repair the muscle damage sustained in training) and carbs (to be stored in your muscles for use in the next day’s of training). You should try to eat within 1-2 hours after workouts to make sure you get enough. Otherwise, the body will start to cannibalize muscle tissue to recover, and you will feel drained because the body is attempting to restore glycogen in muscles but now is sucking it dry and attempting to do so by a much slower process of using other sources such as fat and protein. In fact it is so slow that you will not be recovered by the next day or perhaps even the day after! So eat right after each workout, even if it is a piece of fruit or smoothie for shorter workouts. For a long workout, I would definitely look at eating a larger meal to get protein and carbs back into your body.
Whew!! That’s a lot of information to digest! So many things to think about preparing for the race and then during the race itself! It can feel overwhelming but after a while it all comes pretty natural.
Here is a typical marathon build in Google docs. The dates correspond to this year’s Honolulu Marathon. Note that this employs a 3 week build, followed by a 1 week recovery week to give your body a break before beginning another 3 weeks of building running time.
If you’re reading this and you’re a first time marathoner, hopefully you’ll find this info useful. If you have any questions/comments/concerns, feel free to comment!

Belly Breathing

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A long time ago in Bicycling magazine, I saw an unflattering side shot of Jan Ullrich at the Tour de France showing his belly jutting out. It was, however, an article on breathing from the diaphragm and how it gives you added ability to get more air into your system. The Jan Ullrich picture was not illustrate that he had developed a beer gut, but rather that he was showing a more effective breathing method. Here are some pics of Lance Armstrong on this post from CyclingNews Forums notice how low his belly hangs. He’s also a master of belly breathing.
This came up again just recently for me. I am attempting to build for the Honolulu Marathon at the end of the year right now and just completed my base phase, after about 2 false starts due to having a baby this year and also a nasty allergy attack which set me back about 2 weeks. Previously this year, I had gone out twice to see if I could complete my usual track benchmark of 10x400s RI 1:00. But for some reason, I would seriously wipeout at about 4 400s. I tried both running a little aggressively, and also then tried the second time at a more conservative pace. But no dice. I would get to 4 laps and wipe out.
This was very wrong! In years past, I could always complete my benchmark workout. But this year, I think there was a big difference. This was the fact that I was doing a lot of neuromuscular training on the treadmill. My nervous system is now primed to moving my legs faster than in previous years which is great, but it is unknown how long I can maintain a faster pace since these workouts tend to be a minute maximum with lots of rest, and are more for getting my nervous system used to moving my legs fast and not using extra energy to do that.
So when I hit the track, I was just moving my legs faster given that my nervous system was now OK with that, but I think I hit an upper limit to my lung capacity given the way I was breathing.
All right: I admit it. When I’m out there, I tend to suck in my gut to make myself look better and not like I have a fat belly. But I think this has created an artificial upper bound to my lung capacity because it doesn’t allow me to fully engage my diaphragm when I breathe.
Thus, on previous attempts this year, I would run faster 400s which is good, but wipe out a lot sooner as the oxygen in my system got quickly used up due to running at a faster pace.
The clue I received was from my sports medicine person who told me about belly breathing. I thought about my issues with my benchmark track workout and thought this was worth a try.
Yesterday I headed out to the track and decided to emphasize belly breathing. As soon as I took off the starting line, I would begin to breathe deeply through my belly, and not expanding my chest. I would also practice doing full breaths like this more rapidly. This allowed me to get to the end of my 10x400s and not be totally wiped out. Success!
So I sacrificed a little better profile view of my body for faster speed and sustaining a higher effort. Too bad. I’m still glad I’m improving and getting faster.
More on belly/diaphragm breathing at Wikipedia.

I Am Without My Normatec MVP UGH

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Last year, I got hold of a Normatec MVP and immediately fell in love with it. Going through Ironman training with it has been amazing; after my long rides/runs, I would use it for 30-45 minutes and my legs would feel so refreshed and recovered, and help me be ready for the next day’s workout.
The other week, my MVP electronics unit died! Training for a marathon right now, I am building up to my usual 3 hour/18 mile runs. But man, I can sure feel the difference even so early in my build. I’ve only been running about 1 to 1:15 but working hard with a lively negative split each time.
Without the MVP, I am feeling so much more tighter and sore than using it immediately post-workout. Yesterday after running, I started up my ice baths but that was still not enough to match the effects of a 30-45 minute session with the MVP.
I sent it back to be fixed last week and cannot wait to get it back soon…!

Total Immersion: Swimming Analysis with the GoPro Video Camera

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Two weeks ago I received my GoPro Video camera in the mail and was very excited to see if it could help me videotape my swimming at the pool. I bought both the standard lens and wide angle lens as forums on the TI website had noted that both lenses may be useful depending on what I wanted to video. I also bought the suction cup assembly assuming that it would suction onto the side of a pool. The camera plus suction cup looks like this:

It’s nicely sealed in a watertight case which is waterproof to 100 feet.
Taking the camera to the pool, I found some constraints.
1. Depending on which pool you go to, they may have some rules regarding taking pictures or video because of privacy concerns. I go between two YMCAs and unfortunately they have strict rules on videoing. Thankfully, the lifeguards were pretty cool to let me take some video as long as I was alone in the lane.
2. The tile on the side of the pool may prohibit the suction cup sticking properly onto it. If the tiles are small, it could let air into the suction cup and thus, it won’t stick.
3. Lighting is critical. Since the camera’s sensor is pretty small, the more light the better. So on a sunny day, the video can capture me getting a lot farther down the pool before my body becomes undiscernable. See the comparison on the following two videos. This video was taken at an outdoor pool on a bright sunny day:

You can see my strokes for many times before I disappear into the distance.
This video, for comparison, was taken at an indoor pool with relatively poor lighting.

You can see how the water is much murkier looking in the second video. Unfortunately, I don’t get many strokes down the lane before I disappear so I can’t study my stroke for too many cycles which sucks.
By the way, I editted both videos and cut out the parts of the video where I disappear off into the distance and you can’t see me any more.
4. The video camera should be pointed down the middle of the lane and/or you should swim directly towards it versus off to a side. In the first video, I was able to find a place to stick the camera such that I could swim directly at it. It provides the best view of both sides of my body when stroking. In the second video, the pool side had small tiles, with the exception of where the lane number was and that tile was big enough to put the suction cup on. However, the big tile was offset to the middle of the lane and swimming towards it not directly meant I was losing some view of one side’s strokes.
5. By the way, being alone in the lane is pretty important. Otherwise, somebody else swimming there might inadvertantly knock your GoPro off the wall if they’re not careful. Certainly, you’ll capture a random person on video too.
Watching these videos, I was really able to study the problems in my stroke.
Here is what I learned:
1. Over the last few weeks, I drilled my left arm entry intensely to follow a wider track, since it felt like it was entering way too close to my head relative to my right arm. However, I did feel that my right arm was moving on a wider track. Looking at the video, I saw that my left arm had indeed began entering on a wider track:

This was good and I was happy that my drilling produced the desired result. However, in studying my right side, which I had assumed was doing OK, I noticed that the entry occurred OVER my head.

This was extremely weird and unexpected! At least my right arm ended up in the right place after entry, but it should not be entering into the water OVER my head but it should be further out like my left arm entry.
2. On both sides, upon the end of the spear of my arm forward, it then drops:


In studying swimming videos of Coach Shinji and also Dave Cameron, their speared arms never drop! I believe this robs me of some forward momentum as the deeper my arm is, the more water resistance there is (according to some literature I’ve read about the effect of the stroking arm’s depth).
3. When I swim, I use the two beat kick. On my left side with left arm stroking backward, I kick only with my left leg. Looking on the video, on my right side with right arm stroking backward, I sometimes do a scissor kick and kick with both legs! This can be seen somewhat in this screen grab, although if you watch the first video again, you will see it in motion:

Here my right arm is stroking back and my right leg has kicked, but my left leg is cocked back and just about to kick. This is bad! My proper kicking leg is imparting rotational force to my body turn, which adds force to my stroke backward. However, if I kick my other leg while my body is turning, it resists the force of my body turn and making it weaker, thus making my stroke back also weaker. I believe this is why my left arm spear/right arm stroke back results in lesser forward momentum than my other side; I can see it when I swim where it results in me traveling further on one side but not the other!
I think this is a result of either or both of poor balance on that side and/or just my nervous system being programmed to kick twice for some reason on that side.
Absorbing all this, I jumped into the pool this last week and attempted to correct all of these. The first thing I noticed that was that my left arm spear/right arm stroke back resulted in more forward momentum, now that I focused on only kicking my right leg. Awesome!
Less successfully, I wasn’t able to move my right arm outward as much. I think this will require drilling more at slower stroke rates to fully correct. I seemed to be able to do this at lower stroke rates (I was using my tempo trainer here), but when I got to faster tempos it broke down pretty quickly and I could sense I was back to my old habit of entering OVER my head (so weird…!).
Video analysis is so enlightening and I am now bringing my GoPro always to the pool, in hopes that I can find some accomodating lifeguards who will let me video. I also want to test in another indoor pool which is lighted much better to see how the GoPro performs. I have not tried the wide angle version either, but fear that the distortion of the lens may make swimming analysis difficult. In the forums, someone noted that it was good for taking a longer view of swimming from the side, since the camera is stationary. I will have to try that to see if that is worthwhile. Otherwise, I will just use my wide angle GoPro for cool biking and running shots!

Total Immersion: Retraining the Nervous System with Drills and Tempo Trainer

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These last few weeks I’ve been really focused on retraining my nervous system. Why? Because I was working with Coach Shinji and feeling good about my swimming…until I started doing some detail comparisons of my swimming videos with those of Shinji and on the Easy Freestyle DVD.
UGH!
I had a major problem with what I call “hand lead recovery”. It should be elbow led, not hand led! At times it makes me look like I’m pawing at the water. I also saw that my left arm was clearly doing something different than my right arm. It’s entry was much closer to my head and I really needed to be swimming on wider tracks. I think this also affected my ability to use gravity to assist the hand/arm drop into the water as it spears forward. With a focus on noticing what was different, I swam a few laps and really discovered that my swimming was not symmetrical at all.
At this point, I had to do something about this before I ingrained bad habits. It was time to retrain my nervous system before I had to build for the Alcatraz 100 swim in October.
So I went back to basics. I pulled up Chapter 5 of the Easy Freestyle DVD and concentrated on drilling the elbow circle, ear hops, drawing straight lines front to back to front, and then used the Zen switch drill to practice all this. (To know what these mean, check out the excellent TI DVD, Easy Freestyle DVD).
I spent about a month drilling. My typical workout for this period netted out to about 1000-1200y on a 25y pool and looked like this:
200-400 warm up with typical TI drills:
2×25 Superman glide
2×25 R and L side one arm skate
2×25 R and L side one arm under switch
2×25 under switch swim continuous

2×25 R and L side one arm zen switch to pause, raise elbow to water surface
2×25 R and L side one arm zen switch to pause, raise hand to water surface
2×25 full stroke, one stroke only, start with R or L side, repeat
2×25 full stroke, two strokes only, start with R or L side, repeat
200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, elbow at surface of water
200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, middle of forearm at surface of water
200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, wrist at surface of water
200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, fingertips at surface of water
200y of zen switch continuous, or pause for rest every 50y, full stroke
for the last series of 200y sets, I would focus on elbow circling, drawing straight lines front/back, focus on the position of my left arm as it moved forward and then let gravity drop the arm down into the water and forward to spear.
Some observations:
1. It was interesting to note how different the feeling was between having the hand/arm touching the water versus above the water. The water served to anchor my brain’s perception of where my hand was. When it was out of the water, I immediately felt awkward; I had to train my brain to know where my left arm was in space, as it is moving during swimming! Over a period of a month, I slowly got better at this until I felt like I could, for the most part, repeatedly put my arm in the same place every time as it came forward.
2. With my head down, I would peek at where my arms would spear to. Consistently, my left arm would actually spear almost straight forward whereas my right arm would spear slightly outside, which is where I want it for wide track swimming. I discovered that I had to mentally spear what was perceived as “extra wide” and when I did that, my left arm would actually end up where I wanted it to be. I also realized that my front deltoid and pectoral muscle (specifically the pec minor as this is where my ART guy would constantly work out tightness there) had a twinge of tightness when I speared “extra wide”. I think that a lack of flexibility in my left arm in that area has caused my spear to end up more straight than wide.
3. Coach Shinji would always tell me that my left arm was being thrown more forward and I needed to enter the water closer to my ear. So I had to mentally bring back my entry point closer to my ear.
4. My spearing momentum was very weak and added little to my forward propulsion. This was especially apparent on my left arm, and even worse during when I took a breath when I would literally come to a stop in the water! So now as I enter, I would let gravity take my arm and drop it into the water so that it added momentum to the spear forward. I also had to practice this while taking a breath so that my momentum while turning to breathe would not disappear.
Slow swimming was key here. I got rid of the need to swim fast and just focused on form only. I would stroke slowly back versus with force and found that as my form improved, I was actually moving forward quite fast and smoothly even though I used little force. I definitely now could see what TI coaches were saying in that it is amazing to see how little force one needs to use to swim fluidly and with some speed.
My goal was to first retrain my nervous system using drills and slow swimming. Once my brain got better at telling where my left arm was in space, and I was hitting the “mail slot” on my left side better, as well as having significant improvement on elbow led recovery and not arm led, I started doing reps of 50y or 100y with the tempo trainer. Now I would proceed to retraining my nervous system to repeat the habits at higher speeds.
My strategy was to use the tempo trainer to slowly bring my new habits into ever faster repetitions, or faster arm cycle tempos. I used the tempo trainer in two ways:
1. I used it to determine where my nervous system was at, for a given workout day.
2. Then I would use it to inch my way to a faster tempo and then reinforce the habit at those faster tempos, usually at some tempo limit I had for that day where I could maintain the good form, and also up to the point at which I get tired and when my form starts to fall apart.
After my typical 200-400y warmup, I would then do 100s of Zen switch with arm rising higher each time until I hit full stroke swimming. Then I started using the tempo trainer. I determined that my slow swimming was about at a 1.6 sec tempo. At the first workout, I started just swimming at 1.6 sec tempo to get used to using the tempo trainer again, and syncing my swimming cycle to a beep.
The next workout I started determining at what tempo limit my newfound habits would fall apart. I would swim 100s at 1.6 sec tempo, then drop by .5 sec tempo until I found the fastest tempo where my form would start to fall apart while attempting to keep that tempo.
The first time I tried this, I got to 1.4 sec tempo where for each arm cycle it felt messy and awkward to maintain form. Then I just backed up .5 sec to 1.45 sec where it felt OK. I then proceeded to do what Terry Laughlin did, which was to do laps at .01 sec tempo faster each time until I hit 1.4 sec. Amazingly, if I approached my tempo limit by inching up to it, my nervous system was able to adapt and I could swim with decent form at what seemed to be the tempo at which my nervous system had a limit that day. After inching up to it, I would do a few more laps to reinforce the sensations and habits until I got tired and my form would start to falter again. At this point I would get out of the pool.
Week over week, I was able to get to faster tempos. The next time I started at 1.5 sec and repeated the same descend by .5 sec until I found my new limit (at 1.3 sec) and then backed up and inched towards it again and did some more repeats. The workout after that I started at 1.4 sec and made it to 1.2 seconds. At 1.2 seconds I seemed to need more time to reinforce my nervous system with good form, so I did that workout again.
Also, depending on my mood, how much time I had, and how my body felt, I would sometimes do laps of 50y instead of 100s due to those constraints. But no matter, I was still improving and progressing.
My next step is to do 2 things:
1. Continue form and nervous system training at faster tempos down to .8 sec.
2. Lengthening my laps from 50-100y to 200 and beyond, in preparation for the Alcatraz 100. This would also inevitably mean my total workout length would increase, and I hope to get to 3000-4000y in a workout as I get closer to race day.
Key learnings here are:
1. It takes time and patience to retrain the nervous system but it can be done. I had to give up on being paranoid about not having enough fitness for the Alcatraz 100 in order to find time to do this.
2. Detail analysis, focus and attention to subtle differences during video analysis really helped me figure out what I was doing poorly.
3. Singular focus on a training element helps reinforce that particular habit. But I also would keep in the back of my mind all the other things I should be doing as I focused. This also required practice but is really useful so that my form wouldn’t get messy in other places while I was focusing on one thing.
4. Using the tempo trainer to inch my way to faster tempos is an amazing technique for retraining my nervous system.

Grant Hackett and Ian Thrope Swimming Analysis

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TI coach Dave Cameron posted this amazing series of photos analyzing the freestyle stroke of Grant Hackett and Ian Thrope.
Two things I wanted to point out which were very interesting to me:
First, in pictures 5 and 6, it’s unbelievable to see how high their elbows are on the catch. I tried this and it seemed kind of awkward, and I think ultimately I probably dropped my elbow much more than these swimmers did. I also didn’t feel the full advantage afforded by such a high elbow catch. I hope to work on this more as the beginning TI drills we tend to spear to a certain low position, versus spearing more horizontal and then catching from there, which tends to be something we work on after we get past the beginning drills.
Second, in 14, the text says that in a picture of Hackett that he presses his chest down while breathing. Breathing up to this point for me has always seemed to stop me dead during that moment. So I began trying to press the armpit/chest right at the moment of breathing and some interesting things happened:
1. At the moment of pressing, my head sank very fast and there was only a small moment when I could take my breath before water encircled my sideways facing mouth. This was in contrast to being simply turned and I had more time to take a breath.
2. When I consciously pressed at the breathing moment, my hips rode higher and my momentum was preserved much better, meaning that I still had forward movement versus coming to a stop during the breath.
I hope to see more of these analyses of top swimmers. It’s so instructive to see how they move through the water.

Total Immersion: Swim Breakthrough Friday!

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Friday I had a breakthrough of tremendous proportions in my swimming. Since my last post, I’ve been focusing on my stroke, specifically my arm recovery, as it has been something that hasn’t felt right.
So my typical workout, once I embarked on this focus to fix the problems in my stroke, looks like:
200-300y W/U w/ drills:
200y if I get the shallow end of my pool where I can stand:
2×25 Superman glide
2×25 Alternating R/L arm skate
2×25 Alternating R/L arm underswitch skate
2×25 Underswitch swim continuous
300y if I get the deep end where I can’t stand:
100y swim easy
200y underswitch swim
4×50 Zen switch, arm submerged to elbow, continuous swim
4×50 Zen switch, arm submerged to middle forearm, continuous swim
4×50 Zen switch, arm submerged to wrist, continuous swim
4×50 Zen switch, dragging fingertips along surface
4×50 Swim w/ focus on various arm recovery drill points
The points I had focused on were:
1. Elbow led recovery, via circling the elbow, per Easy Freestyle DVD Chapter 5.
2. Elbow led recovery, by having a straight elbow path, from back to front entry, also per Easy Freestyle DVD Chapter 5. On my left, my elbow is tracing some sort of arc and ends up too close to the centerline. It even causes my body to arc sometimes. In feeling, I attempted to actually trace path that is straight, but angled towards the outside. This probably meant in actuality that my left arm was moving straight forward even though my brain thought it was going forward straight before.
The secondary points I kept a mental check on were:
1. Releasing at the end of the pull back. Tension builds on the stroke back, but then I release it all and relax for the elbow led recovery.
2. Stroking towards the outside, almost at 45 degree angle away from body as Coach Shinji puts it, although I think it just ends up being less than that. I think the important thing is to not end up alongside or close to the body.
3. Wide tracks to swim on, versus being too narrow.
4. Setting up the entry around where the opposite arm’s elbow is, and then letting gravity take the arm into the water and then spearing forward.
5. Upon entering with my left arm, keep it spearing slightly to the outside. Previously I believe I’ve been spearing my left arm too straight forward.
6. Quiet arm entry, and thus quiet swimming and as bubble-less as possible.
Other very important points that I kept an awareness of:
1. For this exercise, I chose to not stroke back strongly, but see if I could impart more forward momentum via the spearing arm rather than depending on the stroking arm back. Coach Shinji and I did some drills to illustrate how much momentum you can generate simply by spearing forward.
2. Stroking back straight and not up or down. My right arm stroking tends to make my body hop up and down slightly, indicating that my stroke back is not exactly straight back and is directing propulsive force in other directions besides fully moving my body forward.
3. At the end of spear forward, let my wrist relax and my hand just hangs down so that it is ready for the catch. This also releases tension in the arm; tension in the arm is bad.
4. Slight attention on bending at the elbow to catch at the front, but not too much at this juncture, as it requires a bit more flexibility than I have at this point.
5. Hanging the head in a relaxed manner.
6. Keeping the body straight, and also when I roll back and forth during swimming to roll on my axis and not swipe back and forth.
As one can imagine, keeping track of all this can be overwhelming; swimming is such a complex activity! Luckily, our bodies have imprinted all this such that all that text is really easy and burned into our natural movements. The problem of course is when we imprint bad habits and have to change them.
Running through my workout, I became a bit more unstable as I have been when my arm starts to get higher out of the water for each drill. But yesterday, I had about a lap of instability and then something changed. My swimming became amazingly relaxed and I was moving forward with ease, and by not stroking back strongly at all.
The sensations I felt were:
1. My head was very relaxed hanging down. But I remember feeling no water swirling at the top which meant that my head was pretty submerged, probably more than it has been.
2. My left arm entry felt really good. I just let it drop into the water and spear forward.
3. As I kept my stroking arm moving with firm but not extra force, I felt the first inklings of what anchoring in the water meant. My stroking arm became an anchor for my spearing arm to push forward against, as well as with a lot of help from my two beat kick putting some authority into my hip turning. With this action, I started to really understand what Coach Shinji meant by saying that you could really move forward fast without using a whole lot of energy.
4. My body was totally straight, and for the first time I felt that I was turning nicely on my axis and keeping like a needle through the water.
5. With all this working, I felt at ease from stroke to stroke, very relaxed, but yet I felt like I was moving smoothly and continuously through the water, with each stroke being very rhythmic and with no stops or starts.
I felt so good that I didn’t want it to end and swam another 4×50 in hopes of it burning into my nervous system just a bit more. It was a banner moment for me in my swimming and I hope to imprint this further in future sessions.

Total Immersion: Working on Arm Recovery and Stroke

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In my last session with Shinji, I worked on my arm recovery. Then, a reader of my blog emailed me for some questions on arm recovery, which prompted me to post on the TI forums, and then prompted this post.
In working on my arm recovery, I have been given many visuals through verbalizations to help with the right motion by Shinji and also some from an Advanced TI Seminar by Dave Cameron. These were:
a. [Shinji] The one trapezoid/shoulder shrug to bring the arm up.
b. [Shinji] Extend the shoulder blade forward
c. [Shinji] Try to exit the hand/arm through the same hole in the water that it’s laying in, at the end of the stroke. Not only does this stop placing forces that are not helping me go forward in the water (ie. making me sink or bounce in the water), I find that dragging your hand out that way means you are naturally doing the elbow led recovery.
d. [Dave Cameron] Imagine during recovery that you are scraping your bicep across the surface of the water as you bring the arm around.
e. [Dave Cameron] Use inner rotation of the shoulder, don’t bring it up and over. The arm tends to trace a path that is more a swing around rather than straight along the path over the body. He has said that inner rotation also saves your shoulder from damage.
Great coaches have a multitude of vocabulary and can come up with many ways to help a student perform some complex action. Then, posting on the TI forums, Terry Laughlin and Dave Cameron both weighed in on these comments. Here are their posts reprinted:
Terry says:
“Dave I would probably have difficulty following those focal points. For instance, I’m not sure how to interpret the phrase “extend the shoulder blade forward.” That’s why I prefer focal points that describe a simple action or a sensation described in ‘universal’ language.
One key to a recovery in which the elbow lifts and leads the hand and forearm forward is how you exit the water. I’ve used the following images to help me with that:
1. Release, rather than push back, at the end of the stroke
2. Release away from the hip – i.e. toward the outside. (This helps combat the tendency to bring the elbow toward the spine on recovery.)
3. Circle the elbow – like the crank of a bicycle. (This helps reinforce #1.)
As for video, Lesson 5 on the Easy Free DVD is devoted to release, recovery and entry. It shows LOTS of video of the rehearsal exercises that improve your kinesthetic awareness of leading with the elbow. Also of the release, recovery and entry, including contrast of all the most common errors and how to correct them.”
Then Coach Dave Cameron posted:
“One thing that must be realized about my coaching is that I always use tricks to get what I want. I wanted it to FEEL like the elbow scraped, but it shouldn’t be as wide as that in reality. Just to get people to break their habits on that one, We started with the release, went to the shrug/shift, the swing, the slice without sacrifice, and the slip.
The recovery can have a lot of variety based on flexibility and balance.
Denser swimmers may need to be wider, especially with breathing in mind. Flexible swimmers will look like Shinji, but be cautious that there isn’t a hitch before entry when swimming (not a drill skill, as KevinM puts it) when you roll through some of the tougher parts of a higher recovery.
If you extend to lock at the end of the pull/anchor phase, it’s very difficult to fix this and have the right recovery. Make sure that when you transition from anchoring, the focus rotates to shoulder and elbow manipulation. If you try to take the hand around, it’s almost impossible to focus on it without putting tension on the marionette arm.”
Absorbing all this as text, and then putting it in my head as a visualization, and also wrapping in my live coaching sessions with Coach Shinji was quite a feat.
Looking to Terry’s comment about the Easy Freestyle DVD Chapter 5, I put that on and found some nice video to complement all the text above.
I think in the end, Terry’s drills on the DVD proved to be the easiest to work with. I went out for a few sessions now attempting to work the exercises and they seemed to work great.
I found out that my left arm was quite different than my right arm, and that it was doing a slightly different, but critically different movement. It definitely showed in how far and fast I would glide between my right and left sides.
Doing the Zen Switch by dragging my arm/forearm/wrist/fingertips through the water while swimming, I found that my strokes were better than when the arm was out of the water. For some reason, when some part of my arm/hand was moving through the water, I had some sort of anchor where I could tell where my arm/hand was and put it in the right place. The moment I lifted it out of the water, my left arm began to lose its form, whereas my right arm was OK.
Other tips that really helped:
1. As Terry mentioned in 2., and also Shinji has said to push water away from you at a 45 degree angle at the end of the pull, this sets up the arm for recovery.
2. I also was stroking not straight back which causes my body to hop up and down as evidence that I was putting force in other directions besides moving me forward. I need to stroke straight back.
3. I need to perfect the arm drop before spearing forward. I seem to have this OK on my right side where I can really feel gravity just dropping my arm into the water and then it spears forward. On my left, it feels awkward and I seem to be using my right arm pulling back as compensation for a weak spear forward. This is really bad when I take a breath and the spear forward is very weak, resulting in me almost stopping when I breathe.
Shinji has told me that the spear forward generates a lot of forward motion and he is right. We have done isolated drills where I am not stroking but merely attempting to move forward via spear alone. It’s pretty amazing how far you can go. So I do not want to lose this momentum generating motion and need to get it right on my left side.
4. Another bad habit to break: sometimes as I bring my left arm through recovery, I tend to arc my body. Very weird and need to stop this.
As always, thanks for the great advice from all my TI coaches and sources of information and lots to work on!

Auditory Cues for Better Running

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One of the tools I use for better running has nothing to do with my feet; it’s my ears!
Great running form is nearly soundless. Each footfall should land with barely any noise, signaling that there is no wasted energy directed into the ground and that as much energy as possible is driving the body forward. Also, it means that there is minimal shock transferred back up the leg and into the body.
Every time I run, I strive for soundless running. I try my best to train my legs to have light footfalls, even while they are cycling fast during sprinting.
Whenever I start to hear louder thumping, I know I’m doing something wrong. Maybe I’m getting tired, or getting lazy, and not concentrating on how I’m placing my foot down. Perhaps I’m moving too fast and I need more training for light footfalls at higher cycle rates. Or sometimes I hear a louder thump from one leg than the other; that means that one of my legs is not moving in the same way as the other – something that needs to be fixed!
Training for light footfalls can be difficult. I have to pick up my leg in order to run, but I don’t want to pick it up too much or else I raise the chance of thumping the leg on the ground. I try to glide my foot across the ground as low as possible, and the gently place it down on my forefoot as my body moves forward and this motion is repeated on the other side. Sometimes my legs are moving too fast, like during sprinting or tempo running, and I need to focus even harder on placing light footfalls.
As I glide my foot forward, I also strive to maintain an even head height and not let it bounce up and down. Bouncing means that I’m wasting energy moving my body up when it should all be directed towards moving my body forward. Inevitably, bouncing leads to louder running as the legs must absorb the energy of the body coming down on each step.
Hills can be challenge, with downhill being harder. I have to aim my foot at an angle down the slope of the hill, while leaning over the foot to keep them under me. The dropping away of a decline means that I need to compensate for that when my foot moves forward to take a step, but also down the slope of the hill.
Then, training for repeatability of light footfalls over time is next. Maintaining light footfalls may be OK for short runs, but training to maintain light footfalls over the length of a marathon means extending my neuromuscular training over time. When we get tired, the legs don’t respond as well and light footfalls may be the first thing to go.
Soundless running is really important to minimize the chance of injury. When you place each foot down with minimal sound, you are landing with minimal shock transmitted back up the leg and into the body. Over time, lots of shock transmitted up the leg will lead to all sorts of problems. Silent running will minimize that shock and allow you to run injury free.
Therefore, whenever I run, my ears are attuned to my footfalls and my goal is to run as silent as possible.

Form Training with the 4 S’s

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In the last few months, I’ve been really into Total Immersion and their teaching method. Swimming is one of those activities which require mastery of so many little details that trying to learn swimming all at once is very very difficult. So they do a great job of breaking down technique with drills, and enforcing focus on only one thing at a time so that you can master that without getting confused by other things you’re trying to learn. Thus, I’ve spent the last many months, and plan on for the better part of this year, in breaking down exactly what is wrong with my stroke and working on each individual part one at a time.
This has led me to believe that its teaching concepts in the area of form training can be applied to any other physical activity, especially in the case of cycling and running for me. In thinking about this, I thought I could encapsulate it in the 4 S’s of form training:
1. SYSTEM: You must have a system for identifying problems, removing bad habits and imprinting new and correct habits. With TI, they’ve done all that for you. Running has some great methods now (ie. ChiRunning, Pose Method) that strive to break down running so that you can focus on parts of your form. I have not found that to be true yet of cycling and would love to be pointed to some that discuss cycling form.
Without a system, you will inevitably try to do too much at once and see little or no improvement as old habits remain ingrained, and you can’t imprint new correct ones. It also means that you are hampering your brain/body’s ability to imprint new habits; someone once told me that you have to do something about 45 days or so to imprint a new habit. This means that you have to perform the new habit in the new way that many times exactly!
2. SENSITIVITY: You need to develop and have a sensitivity to what you’re doing wrong and also what you’re doing right. When habits become ingrained, they become commonplace and we don’t even notice when we’re doing something. This is both good and bad. Correct habits ingrained means we’re unconsciously performing optimally and not exerting excess energy and brain power to maintain activity. But if we’ve ingrained a bad habit, we may actually not know we’re doing something wrong because we’ve been doing it that way for so long. So we need to develop the body awareness to know how are bodies are moving both when we’re moving slow and especially when we’re moving fast. Slow is much easier, but when we’re cycling our arms and legs fast this may become too much to easily discern how and where are body parts are moving. Once we can know when we’re doing something wrong, then we can take steps to fix that.
3. SUSTAINABILITY: Once we ingrain new habits, we must be able to sustain them over the course of training and during the long hours of a race. Thus, we must be constantly wary of falling into old bad habits especially when we get tired and/or we lose our mental focus. Training only good habits and extending them over time will ingrain good form that is sustainable over a long time, ensuring an efficient race (and probably also injury free).
4. SYMMETRY: One thing that gets sometimes overlooked is the importance of symmetry of habits on each side of your body. We humans are built with two halves, both mirror images of each other. But unfortunately, we often perform the same activity differently on each side of our body due to old habits, favoring our strong side, muscle inbalances, etc. So while our form may be great on one side, we may find that the other side is challenged. Therefore, training to make sure that we even out both sides to equal form is important or else bad form on one side can actually affect performance on the other side.
Going back to the first S which is SYSTEM, it may be hard to find a system for your activity. TI does a great job for swimming and there are some running ones, but for cycling it may be hard. But finding a great SYSTEM will enable SUSTAINABILITY and SYMMETRY more, and help you train your brain to be more SENSITIVE.