Preparations
Source: Joseph Vinciquerra
It’s so close to being “go-time” that I can taste it. Hard work is what defines us as triathletes, and I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to begin another year of it.
This week was all about preparing to begin structured training. Next Monday it begins, but to do so, I needed a few pieces of information first. I spent the off-season of 2005 and the majority of the 2006 in-competition training season focusing on improving my run. Running speed, economy and endurance were all equally important as I strived to really make the run one of the more damaging aspects (to the competition) of my performance in races. During my first A-race this past year, I saw a lot of people slip by on the half-marathon… But by the time the Timberman rolled around, it was me doing the passing. And knocking over a half of an hour from my marathon PR this year was the culmination of that kind of run focus. This year, my primary focus during the preliminary portion of the off-season will be swimming. I’m not too concerned about being able to “complete” the Ironman swim, but in order to feed into my other season goals for 2007, I’m going to need to work on my speed in the water. And the groundwork for this was to have my swim stroke analyzed.
In the Fall of 2004, I entered the local pool for the first time since I took swimming lessons as a young child. For all intents and purposes, I didn’t know how to swim. My goal was to train myself how to swim for triathlon, while my rationale was that I was an accomplished cyclist, and a decent runner. How hard could swimming be? (Insert laughing gallery of experienced triathletes here) Well, for those who’ve followed a path similar to mine, you know exactly how hard swimming is. But I worked through it, and I’ve scrutinized my own technique for the past two years, working to develop it. This past summer, however, as I was preparing to race Timberman, I knew I’d finally “maxed out” my abilities to judge my own swimming, and decided before getting into Base building for 2007 that I would seek assistance.
The protocol for analyzing my stroke was elementary: Swim a 500m controlled TT, concentrating on form, and then analyze the resulting videos. Below are single-pass snippets of the videos, with comments on what I’m doing right, and what I could be doing to improve my swim. To give you an idea of where I’m at, I’m a 1:45 min/100 yard swimmer with open (not flip) turns on a 1000yd TT.
Side-Looking Underwater
This is probably the most telling angle to study. I think seeing yourself swim from the side over a length is more valuable than anything else you could do in the water on your own. As it turns out, this video highlights all of the major things I need to improve upon. First, you’ll see that my hand entry is good, but for some reason, I have a tendency to open my hand up in such a way that my fingertips break from their position pointing towards the floor, and drift up momentarily to towards the surface of the water before “cupping” to begin the pull. Why I do this, I don’t know. But basically it’s creating a huge amount of drag, and a pause in my stroke that’s causing me to lose momentum. Correctly, I then cup my hands and “grab” water on the pull. My pull is strong, but I tend to keep my hand a bit far from my belly, which results in a loss of leverage on the water. To improve this, I need to work on bringing my hand towards my belly as I complete the pull – like climbing a rope – in order to really muscle the water. Lastly, on the pull, you’ll see that I follow the pull all the way back to my hip… This helps the glide, but you can see there’s a point where my “pull” actually becomes a “push” as my hand approaches the surface of the water during the motion from my belly to my hip. This causes my legs to drop a bit, and again, contributes to a loss in momentum just prior to beginning the recovery. Solution? Focus on slipping my hand directly up (from the elbow) once my fingertips and arm become in-line and point to the floor of the pool. Oh… And as you can see, I love to kick. I love to use those leg muscles. The only problem – duh – is the oxygen that those big muscles use. So, switching from a 6–beat kick (good for 100m repeats or less) to a 2–beat kick (good for 1000m efforts) is a no-brainer improvement to focus on.
Side-Looking Above Water
This angle is pretty good for judging the streamline, the breathing mechanics, and the recovery portion of the stroke. Looking at this video, you can see that I have a nice, high elbow on the recovery, and a relatively clean hand entry. I could stand to “stab” the water a bit more aggressively on the entry, but I’m doing good by slipping into the water and avoiding any “slapping”. My breathing and my roll is good, but I tend to reach towards the water with my mouth, rather than relying on the body roll to bring the air to my mouth – especially as I get tired. My head position is good, but my feet tend to be just a bit low in the water, adding a bit of drag.
Front-Looking Underwater
I like this view quite a bit, because it really shows how effective (or not effective) the body roll and the head position is during the stroke cycle. As you can see, I do a pretty good job of keeping my head steady and looking down towards the bottom of the pool. My body roll is about as good as gets for a guy of my build. Hand entry is good, and I don’t seem to cross-over the mid-line of my body on the pull. I could probably gain 30 seconds per 100yd, however, by shaving that Austin Powers-like carpet on my chest.
Front-Looking Above Water
This last view doesn’t tell as much as the previous three, but does the job for showing how “straight” I swim and the high-elbow on the recovery. It also shows that I have good entry lines; my hands don’t cross over, rather, they stay within the tube defined by the width of my shoulders. You can see here how I tend to “reach” for the air during breathing, but the good news is the straightness – no fish-tailing, which I’m told can be a pretty common problem. Between this view, and the side-looking underwater view, I know I could also work to drop my chin another degree or two to help bring my legs up.
I know I highlighted the things that I need to work on more so than the things that I do well… Not because the number of the former outweighs that of the latter, but because that was the point of the analysis. I know what I need to do, and now I’m off to do it. I’ll be measuring my progress throughout the off-season as I do with the other two disciplines – with testing. Every set number of training weeks I’ll be doing 1000m Time Trials (as I did last year) in order to see if the little changes I’m making really offer up that elusive “free speed” in the water.
Speaking of testing, and changing gears a bit, I did my first LT test of the 2006–07 season on the bike last night. This year, I’ve adopted a slightly different (and I believe more accurate) protocol for determining power at functional threshold, and I’ve made the change to doing the tests on my race bike (on the trainer) rather than my road bike. To answer the universal question (why do this?), I do this because all of my training workouts prescribe certain amounts of time at certain levels (or zones) of power. In order to ensure continual growth over the season, one needs to perpetually update their “baseline” power value from which these “zones” are calculated. Think of it as increasing the amount of weight you lift every couple of weeks to continue building your muscles - you wouldn’t lift the same amount of weight for an entire year, right? To answer Tammy’s question on whether I do it in the lab or in my home: I once did an LT test in a lab (by blood) and shortly thereafter I did an at-home experimental method (by HR). The results were so close, that I’ve since done field or at-home versions exclusively because (1) they’re easy to do and (2) they serve as excellent, high intensity workouts once every so many weeks. When I began training by power-monitoring in place of heart rate, I simply assumed the correlations between lab-based and at-home-based methods would suffice. Last year, I tested my power at threshold approximately once every 4 to 6 weeks during off-season, and then once or twice during season. They aren’t fun, by any means, but the resulting data are invaluable.
The new protocol I’m following should produce a value of power lower than what I would see by following last year’s methods (the new protocol is designed to pre-fatigue the rider, in order to avoid the results being artificially high due to freshness). Numbers at this point in the season aren’t important, but I can tell you I put out a better wattage than I did at this time last year, but not so high as this time. Rest assured, there will be plenty of more talk this year about power.
Thanks for reading.
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