Intensity and Rest

Hey everybody, I’m back again with yet another blog post. As I’m writing this I’m just finishing a well-needed off-ish week. At the end of last weekend, and after some particularly tiring intervals on Saturday and Sunday, I, and many other of my teammates, were feeling pretty tired, so we turned our semi-off week into a kind of full off week. Saturday we had a tempo workout going up a hill, and, at the risk of being shown up by the new addition to our team, Ben, I may have gone slightly over zone. Fortunately, I have a crazy new watch that can graph out my workouts, so here’s a picture of exactly how much over zone I went! Dark red is altitude, and light red is my HR, and the zones are overlaid in the back. Zone 3 A was the zone I was aiming for. We also finished that workout off with a good 2 hours of high zone 1 running.

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We did do some easy training to, here’s a video of myself doing some technique work with Aidan and Andrew.

Sunday was also pretty hard, we did some zone 5 work, starting with a 6 minute rollerski race up Fortune Hill, then some head to head sprints, full body and double poling, around a loop we had set up.

So, tired from that, I took 2 full days off (excluding some easy biking), and then did some really hard intervals on Wednesday. It was really hot out and my heart rate was skyrocketing way out of zone as we did the striding intervals up our local downhill ski resort. Below is another graph of that training. It was hard, but I’m pleased to say that myself, Mike, Aidan and Guillaume can all run up that hill faster than the downhill bikers on the chairlift. We finished that training off with some good Saint-Jean late night celebration, and some additional celebration for our teammate Leif Lennie, who headed off to thunder bay last Friday to train with NTDC.

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A couple more easy days, then Saturday we started training again, and Sunday (today) we did a rollerski time trial. We do this same time trial twice every year, so as long as your rollerskis don’t change, you can compare your times quite well. I was still feeling pretty tired, and physically didn’t feel great, but I did have a good race nonetheless. Last spring I did it in 26:12 minutes, then in the fall I did it in 23:59 (with new wheels), then today I did in 23:57. Not a huge gain, but it felt good, and I’m happy to be just as fast so early in the summer compared to last fall.

On the schedule next week is the OWL camp. Hosted by our friends the Van Wjiks at OWL rafting, it’ll be a 5-day long camp of high volume and intensity and awesome. We’ll be heading down there Tuesday, so tomorrow I’m going to take yet another recovery day to be in top shape for that camp.

Lastly, as promised, here is some video of the course we used for those cornery intervals. I took a video of myself rollerskiing and sped it up for your viewing pleasure. Have fun, 'till next time.

And June Begins

So I’m relatively new to this whole “blog” thing. My friend, Patrick Stewart-Jones, also started a blog around the same time (here), we’ve each got hit counters installed, so we’re seeing who’s going to have the more popular blog. So in an effort to make my blog more interesting, I’ll be trying to post more pictures and be more interesting. Also, don’t click on the link to his blog.

I’m just going to start off by posting a video – some of you may have already seen it, others not. We’ve been trying a bunch of new training here at Nakkertok, here’s a snapshot of it.

Edited by Peter Lloyd, my dad. Fun Fun Fun.

This last week has been pretty tiring. It included the beaver chase – a 3.75 mile, very low key, local running race that takes place 4 or so times a year. The name comes from one year, where a beaver came onto the trail and, scared, ran away from the runners, thus leading the race for a bit. All of use are definitely getting faster, personal bests were falling all round. Even with a mediocre race on my part, I beat my best time by a good 10 or so seconds.

Leif and I in a painful sprint to the finish last year. Whether I beat him or he beat me is still up to debate.

Wednesday we went for a rollerski on the pathways through Ottawa. On a particularly steep downhill, I decided to see what kind of reaction I could get from the other people walking and biking on the hill. Going down the hill, I started waving my hands in the air and screaming loudly: “NO BRAKES! NO BRAKES!!” while swerving and cutting people off (cutting a person off). It’s win-win – we have a good time, and they get a story to tell. Good times.

Saturday we did a really fun workout. Our coach, Mike, discovered this “network” of bike pathways at the intersection of two perpendicular roads. These pathways, a little under 2 metres wide, looped constantly around, up and down, 90 and 180 degree corners, for a good minute and a half of intense rollerskiing.

We did 2 by 4 times 4 minutes out and back on this track, high zone 3, mass start. It would start on a slight downhill for about a hundred metres, before going straight into an almost 180 degree turn with a big and slippery puddle at the apex. Accelerate out of the corner, then turn, then downhill, then another sharp 90-degree corner, then an uphill 180 before looping up and turning onto a bridge. Go out a bit, then turn around and come back the other way. The corners were sharp enough that, at least in one case, you needed to shave speed to avoid being shot into a fence. All through the interval you would be either cornering, accelerating or resting/decelerating, as well as fighting for positions. Photos to follow, next time I pass by there.

Though staying in zone was difficult during the very technical parts, and a couple crashes did happen, the intervals were great for working on keeping your speed through corners, as well as being efficient through technical sections of races. Not to mention they were extremely fun to do. Definitely would recommend these, I’m really looking forward to doing them again.

Other than that, I’m now officially graduated from CEGEP, and am a diploma-carrying graduate from the science program. So don’t mess with me. I’m also, with the help of the rest of the team, building a nice little website for our Continental Cup Team. Hopefully we’ll have it up and running midway through the summer, stay tuned.

Me all grad'ed up with the gowns and all. Yes, I do have running shoes on. Just to show I'm an athlete at heart.

May's Training

Another month's gone by, its june already! What a month. My goals for this month were to get back into training consistently, get to the gym a lot to improve my strength, and overall just train myself into shape for training harder.

So I was quite surprised as I was viewing my training log and May turned out to the be the month that I'd trained the most... ever. I'd clocked in just over 74 h of training - and almost a quarter of that was done in the strength room. It would appear to have been a hard month, but it didn't seem that intense at all, which is what surprised me. Even with final exams in my CEGEP program, a couple really late nights studying, I'm feeling pretty good.

The highlight of the month would definitely be the Kingston Camp I did with Nakkertok. A 4 day camp, which began with the 145 km bike down to kingston, then 4 days of high volume and intensity, then a 190 km bike home. The camp included a lot of road biking, and although it rained... every time we went riding, it was still a blast.

On the ride down, we left a bit out of town to avoid traffic, with a couple of the older guys from Nakkertok: Myself, Aidan and Leif Lennie, Andrew and Patrick Stewart Jones, Riel Allain, Guillaume Ethier and Seb Townsend. Of course no ride is complete without some form of racing, so with about 50 km left Aidan and I broke away and hammered out the last 50 km as fast as we could. So much fun.

After we had all arrived, we went straight to the strength room and got an hour and a bit or so of strength in to finish off the day. The next days were equally intense, always double days, with intervals, strength on skis, rollerskiing, running, biking, sprints, etc... The ride home, though only Aidan, Riel and myself did it, was also a lot of fun. There wasn't much wind, but we managed to maintain a 35 km/h average for the whole 190 km.

Another thing we did this month was enter an adventure race. It was a 5 ish hour event, up in plaisance. Also a lot of fun. I entered with Aidan Lennie, but Andrew and Patrick, Noémi and Michelle, and Mike and Gabe also entered. We had some setbacks early on in the race, during the canoe section, which put us back about 50 minutes from Andrew and Pat who ended up winning. It was really fun - the best part was the orienteering, some parts of which we were up to our necks in water. Last was the bike section, and it was raining so hard the trail was all mud, any time you torqued the pedals at all your tires would just spin. Very fun event all in all.

Other highlights of the month include my running to much and getting shin-splints, going to the gym very often, in an attempt to be a bit stronger a skier, something I need to work on, and a 10 km race I did by myself. I wanted to sign up for the race, but didn't want to pay the money, then decided to race, but then the registration was full, so I took a 10 km course around my house, and ran it as fast as I could solo. Running a race all by yourself is weird, if you've ever tried it. In any case, I finished it in 35:50, which was a personal best for me, so I was pretty stoked to do that so early in the season.

All in all, a really fun month of training, lots of gains, and lots of fun. Looking forward to June.