Triathalon training in the UK. Training Bible.

Friday 15 April 2011

Excuses, Excuses...


A busy few months working away has meant more time off the bike than I would like. Popped over to Mallorca in January with the GB Para-Cycling squad, then it was down to Newport Velodrome with the squad for 8 days of intensive track work in February. A couple of weeks at home, then a long drive down to Montichiari, near Brescia in Italy for the Para-Cycling World Track Champs. Took a bike but only managed two rides and could feel the little bit of fitness I had, ebbing away. Still although the championships were hard work, they were very exciting. The GB squad is lottery funded and sponsored by Sky, with most of the Athletes full time and based in Manchester. This level of support is the envy of most nations including the USA who were in the pits next to us at the Velodrome and were constantly scrounging tools from our mechanics. We got on well though, so they were welcome. With 18 medals we topped the table and are the Nation that everyone else looks at, we can appear a little arrogant though! Anyway it’s all about next year London 2012 and everything this year is done with that in mind, points win prizes, the number of points won in competition this year will determine the number of athletes able to compete at the London Paralympic Games. We certainly picked up a few in Italy. It was hard work trackside but being so close to the action was great fun - even enjoyed the long drive back, while the athletes flew home from Verona.

Then it was down to Celtic Manor Hotel for a team day, apparently its £160 to play a round of golf on the Ryder cup course and even though it was midweek there were plenty of takers. Anyway back to that lost fitness! Have managed to get back on it a bit, not got the time for loads of miles so when I do ride I “nail it”. Its hard work but I know it gets results and after 4-5 weeks I can feel a few “green shoots of recovery”. A family holiday and then Switzerland and Spain with the Para boys and girls for 12 days will soon put an end to that.

Enjoyed a morning taking pics at the Ringwood Triathlon recently, I did this race a couple of time in its first incarnation in the early nineties. Organiser Michelle Noble of Results triathlon put on a great race and was rewarded with warm spring sunshine. The course is pretty much the same as 20 years ago and the long drag up Bolderwood drive with the steep bit at the end, caught more than a few out. Winner James Gilfillan looked very comfortable, I know because I was there taking photos of him. I still regularly train on this course and always have to work hard.

London Marathon time again and I have had the usual last minute panic appointments for massage, some of you should have come months ago. Most of the people I have been seeing started training a week or so after Christmas so have racked up a fair few miles. I must wish local star Steve Way good luck, his training has been a bit disrupted this year but he certainly puts in the hard work. Whether he has the form to beat last years 2.19.39, and 17th place I do not know, but I know he will be giving it his best shot - Now that’s something to aspire to!

See you up the road…
ED

Eamonn Deane is a TrainingBible UK specialist in the field of sports massage. To find out more about his work, check out his new website at
www.sportsmassagebournemouth.co.uk

Thin slicing

As many of you will know I spend my working life split between facilitating Leadership training programmes for corporate clients and coaching athletes. I find both areas really motivating as they are fundamentally about helping to develop an individual's potential. Recently I have been working on a Leadership project for a major bank and was reminded about the book "Blink", by one of the participant's performance in some of the tasks we coached them through. In the book, it's author Malcolm Gladwell describes how the human brain is able to take in, what on the surface seems, a very small amount of information and extrapolate it very quickly. A good example would be how a tennis player reacts to return a fast serve, the unconscious brain takes in lots of sensory information from the servers body position and ball toss and seemingly without a thought moves to the position where the ball can be hit and returned over the net. All this happens in fractions of seconds. Gladwell calls this ability 'thin slicing'. He puts foward the idea that the more we have practised and mastered a particular skill the better we become at thin slicing information. He asserts that because our brain, through its learned experience of these very specific experiences, can effectivly short cut through the sensory information and make super fast decisions in fractions of seconds i.e. in the blink of an eye or even faster. We all wonder why Rodger and Rafa seem to have so much time when returning a serve, now it becomes obvious, their abilty to thin slice the information and move even before the ball is hit, means that added fraction of a second seems like a lifetime.

This theory makes a lot of sense, we know as humans we all live in our own world of perception, experiencing life through our own very specific filters. We all make assumptions about the world we live in or we'd never risk never making it out of bed in the morning. Imagine waking up and trying to decide if the ground was going to be there or not! We assume it is and get up - well, at least its never failed me thus far. When we meet or work with people who have mastered this in an area of life we are interested in it can be a fascinating experience. I have been struggling with an injury for a couple of months, and this week I went to see my physiotherapist, Tim Cruise-Drew. He specialises in working with runners and triathletes, so he has the experience of seeing and treating probably a couple of thousand of athletes across his career. This helps him to thin slice the information he is seeing - its the tiny, inperceptual details that he is aware of, that other physios may not pick up or misinterpret, that make the difference to his ability to identify the source of the injury. Thanks Tim, your insights are making a difference already!

Its what I call the difference that makes a difference. How does this relate to an endurance athlete's performance? According to Gladwell, there seem to be lots of ways that thin slicing works - here are just a couple of thoughts. A few seconds can be the difference between a podium position and 20th place. Think about how much faster you have riden a bike course after you have done it a few times. Depending on the course the difference between riding it for the first time and and the second can be many minutes. The more we learn about the course the faster we are able to thin slice the information we recieve from it and the faster we can go, seems obvious... right? What about the times when you have just gone with the flow in a race and suprised yourself with your performance? Sometimes those thin slices of information provide what we might call a gut reaction. If you'd have stopped to consciously analyse what was going on you might have talked yourself out of it. I remember chatting to an athlete that ran a marathon and on his way broke his 10k, 10 mile and half marathon PB, on the way to his marathon PB. When I asked him about it after the race he told me he had forgotton his watch and just ran as fast as he felt his body would allow him. I am not suggesting we all throw our Garmin's away - just become aware of the potential of the thin slice :-)



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