JANE NOLAN WRITES IN WITH HER REPORT ON THE WEEKENDS AGE GROUP TRAINING CAMP!
Well folks it seemed at times like half of Piranha were in the Glenview over the weekend. There were two TI camps on down there and I'll fill you in on the one I attended along with Osgar and the new love of his life - his new bike, Mood Dog who may have recruited one new member, Pat who let me put my knee in his arse more then once, Andrew who is "ripped" (according to himself!) and Cormac who can eat more than the rest of us put together & still run faster!
Two coaches from British Triathlon - Rob Harvey - coach to British Cycling & Mark Laithwaite Ironman & European Duathlon Champ put the 40 of us from all round the country through 4 "maximum" tests in total. The idea is to run the tests again in 9weeks and record progress made. The tests were as follows:
T15 - run as far as you can in 15mins around a race track - measure distance & avg HR
TT - time trial on the bike - a 5.6m route from Kilmacanogue to Djouce Golf Club - yes that's up that big blinking hill! Measure time & avg HR
T20 - swim as far as you can in 20mins - measure stroke count at start, middle & end, avg stroke rate & stroke count & distance
T100 - what time can you swim 100m in - measure as a % of output in your T20 test
We had been asked to do two "sub maximal" tests before the weekend - maffetone tests in cycling & running at very low hr - again as a way of measuring our current fitness levels. We didn't submit these results so not sure what that was about???
This camp is the first of 3. For those interested TI are opening up entry to the second camp on their website this morning - its on March 8th & 9th and costs
€130ish and you can run most of the tests above in your own time so don't think you had to attend the first one.
So what else did we cover? Apart from constantly trying to eat all the free food around the place and scoff two desserts - you know who you are MD & CD! we did a session in the classroom beside the pool in NAC on swim theory, the importance of measuring stroke rate & count - the differences between them, what exactly you need to work on to increase speed, what drills & gym work you need to do to improve power in your swim stroke, why some people are good at sprints vs long distances, windmilling style v's front quadrant style (yes I hadn't a clue what they were either at the start!)
We did a session on the most common injuries to triathletes and stretches to avoid those injuries. A tour around the gym watching demos on the correct way to do the 6 weights drills recommended to do over the next 9 weeks in our Strength & Conditioning session.
Another session on bikes and cheez were the lads in heaven here talking about all the gear you can get - boys & their toys eh? Tri bars, aero helmets, deep inset wheels, carbon cranks, elbow positions, angles of your hips to your earlobes - you just couldn't stop them once they got started!
The whole idea is that the weekend is building to one specific race in the season - they selected the Vancouver Worlds on June 8th - Olympic distance. So if the race we want to target is later or shorter/longer in the season we can adapt the plan to suit. All the results from our tests above are being plugged into numerous spreadsheets as I speak and Rob & Mark are emailing our plans to us today. The lads have us scheduled in for 11 sessions a week - 3swim, 3bike, 3run and 2S&C - so obviously I'll need to ramp that up a bit in order to finish Athy - my first Olympic distance race coming up. To give you an example each session is broken into L1 to L7 based on our HR zones from the tests above. The L1 swim session takes approx 90mins covering 3100m & is broken down into warm-up, drills, kick session, main session and warm down. Pretty full on stuff. In my world that will probably translate to one of the club swims in WW.
One of the best session of the weekend was a game of murder ball in the gym studio with a fitness ball - Osgar was definitely taking his frustration out on Mood Dog - maybe he was just jealous of his shaved legs - then again maybe not...
Anyhoo I hope the rest of yis post up with your thoughts on the weekend and any jokes I missed out on - Mood Dog you feel free to share with the group all your quips over the weekend. Safe to say it was a very enjoyable weekend and I have signed up for the next one - don't forget those favours you owe me Cormac!!!
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