Posts Tagged biking
What elements impact our workouts?
Posted by Adam Ainbinder in Cycling, Goals, Ironman Training, Running, Triathlon on September 30, 2009
I had a great conversation with a friend today. He’s very analytical, but primarily focused on business. He read my blog and mentioned that he enjoyed my scientific approach to training. He made some suggestions that I should monitor and study how they impact my workouts.
My workout today, a very fast paced zone 1 (barely to zone 1) workout that was as fast as my zone 2 portion of my workout on Saturday, got me thinking about the details of a run and what impacts heart rate, and therefore, pace. My guess is the hot, humid weather impacted my heart rate on Saturday versus the cool morning today. But who knows. It could of been diet, sleep, etc..
I kind of want to know. I thought about all the things that can impact a workout. I instantly thought about multiple regression models that could predict the workout time for a given heart rate based on all of these factors. Yup, I’m a nerd.
But first step would be, what factors influence a run and/or bike workout, and maybe even a swim workout. All things that could impact the workout even a little should be considered, and we can let the multiple regression model workout which ones are actually significant. Even without a regression model, I’m sure we can identify trends. Here’s what I’ve got so far, and I believe there are multiple ways some of these can be filled in, so it will take a little more though (please comment if you have other influencers):
- Day before diet
- Day of diet
- Diet during workout
- Hydration
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Wind
- Weather conditions (rain, hail, snow)
- Pollen count (friend thinks this affects people more than we believe it does)
- Equipment (e.g. clothes, bike, hydration packs, shoes)
- Company (e.g. friends, training clubs)
- Sleep quantity (number of hours)
- Sleep quality (restful / not restful)
- Stress (maybe high stress is good for workouts)
- Hills
- Bowel movements (yup, all athletes know this can make/break a workout)
- Time awake before workout (similar to time of day)
- Stretching before
- Pains (e.g. nagging pains, injuries, soreness, tightness, etc..)
- Motivation (e.g. excited, not excited, bored)
- Workout stops (my guess is stopping at lights makes shorter runs easier since the heart rate has a chance to recover)
A fairly exhaustive list. What am i missing?
Training: Week 1
Posted by Adam Ainbinder in Ironman Training on May 27, 2009
Ok, i will assume this is my first week of ironman training, or at least first documented week. It’s been a challenging one. This past weekend, I ran 17 miles, biked 51 on a 2500 ft ascent, swam for 45 minutes, and did 5.5 miles of speed work yesterday with push ups, pull ups, and sit ups to finish it off.
Today, well, today is a day off. A well deserved one. But when I get obsessed with working out, these days off feel like a step back. Nevertheless, the rest days are probably the most important days of the week (from what I read). My muscles need it to rebuild from the damage inflicted over the previous few days. Active.com says that it takes about 2 weeks of inactivity to start losing what you have achieved. So what’s one day 
?
Today i have serious shin splints. Tomorrow I plan on doing more speed work in the morning. I think though, how will I do it with the pain I feel today? I feel like this is the ongoing dilemma of training, and I’ll probably write about this over and over. I think a key point of training is learning to work through pain. Know your body’s limits, and push through it if you’re able. When your body screams stop, stop. But if it’s simply pouting, work through it.
I’ve also been hungry as hell lately. My god. I swear I ate a total of about 5 meals yesterday. I guess this makes sense given that I burned over 5k calories with just my two workouts on the weekend. But it’s weird eating almost twice as much as usual and still feeling hungry.
And I guess I need to get used to being more tired from weekends then my week at work. Mondays are brutal, and with the difficult, intense work weeks, each day just gets harder. I will need to change my sleep patterns to figure out how to recover.
So many things to consider when changing your training regimen to about 10 hours a week. I wonder what 15 hours a week will bring?
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