Here’s a simple exercise. Add up all the hours you trained in your biggest week and then divide that by the total number of hours in the entire week (168). The results should be humbling. Even a massive 24 hours of training in a single week is only 14.2% of that week. In other words, you spend 85% of your time doing stuff other than exercise.
Improving your efficiency as a swimmer is one of the hardest parts of being a triathlete. Not because swimming is that incredibly hard, but because proper swimming is a skill-oriented exercise. All the fitness in the world won’t help you if only 5% of that strength is contributing to your forward motion in the water.
As the early big races of the season are approaching, it’s time to once again consider perhaps the hardest part of your training: the taper. While almost every triathlete has heard of tapering, very few actually get it right. This article has two goals: to help you understand your personal needs and cues for tapering based on your event, and to give you active steps you can take to implement your taper.
As promised, Marathon Nation is now live. This running community will help a small group of people take their running game to the next level through a combination of training advice, constant support, self-directed learning, and peer-to-peer interaction.
Where does the time go? I can’t even remember the last time I posted here and it’s not because I am slacking. Quite the opposite; 2010 is shaping up to be a pretty awesome year. Endurance Nation is growing steadily (we just shipped over 100 singlets!), my new book on Endurance Lifestyle Design is due out soon (no really it is!), and in just a few days, we’ll be opening the doors to Marathon Nation.
The life of the 21st century athlete is all about doing more. We want to be faster and stronger even as we get older. We want to do more, learn more, work more, earn more, even as the amount of time we have to do each of these things gets smaller with each additional focus. The popular solution of choice appears to be multitasking: I can drive and shave, I can shop and talk, I can run and watch the news…
Here we are with the second half of our look at triathlon bike safety. In Part One I looked at the macro-level elements of riding safely; in this post we’ll look at more specific steps you can take to improve your chances of riding unscathed. While some of these tips are obvious, I hope you can take away some new things…feel free to add your comments below!
Another crazy week, this one marred by my first serious injury of 2010 (yes, I assume there will be more!) and filled by the crazy work preparing for the launch of Marathon Nation.
Hi, I'm Patrick McCrann.
I'm a 14-time Ironman finisher and the author of Train to Live, Live to Train: How to Build the Ultimate Fitness Lifestyle and Competitive Triathlon in 10 Hours a Week.
Learn more About Me or just Contact Me.
