Minnesota

It's just plain cold up here. I'm in Minne-So-Cold and it's living up to it's name. When I arrived here, the pilot so politely told us the temperature was 4 degrees and then added "that's above 0." Like there's a big difference at that temp. The wind chills are in the -25 to -35 range with exposed skin warnings of 10 minutes. Time to run on the treadmill and stay indoors.

Evotri

It's spring time and time to apply to file more team applications. This time it's with Evotri and it's a different process. First Evotri wasn't necessarily looking for podium finishers as much as community oriented people and not just any community people. The community they are interested in is the endurance community.
The application process was also different this time. Most applications are just written but this time it had to be a video application. Where to start? My first thought was to get filmed swimming, biking and running and then splice everything together into a movie. Off to Swim Labs to get filmed and then I had my wife and some friends film me cycling and running.
I then decided to splice in some stills from races and training and even to incorporate some testimonials from friends. Converting video from VOB to MPEG2 to AVI so it could be copied into windows movie maker was a challenge but that's another post.
The good news is that after hours of editing, I actually produced a video. The bad news is that I wasn't selected as one of the finalist. Oh well. It was a good experience learning how to make movies and if I need to make another movie, I'll be better equiped to handle it.

Maintenance

If you're like me, you've been spending time on the trainer building your base. Something to think about right now is getting your bike tuned up for the season. A lot of bike stores are offering specials on tune ups right now and they aren't very busy.

I noticed that my shifting was a little hesitant going from 13 to 14, 14 to 15 and 16 to 17. I called my local bike shop and took my bike in for a tune up. Talking to the technician, all my cables had stretched.

Since they weren't too busy, they were able to retension all my cables and adjust both derailers in one day. I didn't lose that much training time and I would rather lose it now and have a good shifting bike than wait until race season. So if your bike hasn't been tuned in a while, call your bike shop and get one now before the season starts.

Tempo

When training for marathons, I usually think the standard twenty minute tempo run to be too short. If I'm going to be racing for three hours, shouldn't my tempo workouts be closer to forty or sixty minutes?

The way I do longer tempo runs is by using cruise intervals. The purpose of the tempo run is to run at or near your lactate threshold so your body improves its threshold. It also has a mental component where you mentally get conditioned to holding your pace for a longer period of time. Cruise intervals are done by running at your lactate threshold for five to fifteen minutes, taking a short rest interval and then repeating. You could do six repetitions with one minute rest. This would give you thirty minutes at your tempo pace with the rest intervals making sure your body didn't exceed your threshold for too long.

It's a good way to do a longer tempo run without exceeding your limits.

Doubles

As the days get longer and warmer, it's time to start thinking about double workouts again. I've started doubling up on a few days but not every day yet. I'm trying to gradually work my way back sort of like how you slowly climb into a cold pool. One day at a time, one extra workout at a time. I try to start doubles with swimming and either running or cycling. Since swimming is mostly upper body it compliments the lower body workout of running and cycling.