For the triathletes out there, an interesting study has been posted online for publication in a future issue of the European Journal of Applied Physiology: “Combine cycle and run performance is maximized when the cycle is completed at the highest sustainable intensity.”
A pair of Australian researchers asked a group of triathletes to perform a series of four 20K bike/5K run time trials, with the intensity of the bike ride varying from 80% to 100% of max intensity (compared to an isolated bike trial they’d done previously). As expected, going harder on the bike led to slower times for the run — but the effect was most pronounced for just the first kilometre of the run, after which it didn’t really matter how hard the subjects had gone on the bike. As a result, the fastest overall bike-run times came when the effort on the bike was highest. In other words, holding back in any way on the bike loses you time that you can’t make up on the run.
Now, there are a number of caveats. The study was small (5 men, 3 women), but the effect was very clear-cut (average times of 62:40, 59:53, 58:29 and 56:37 for the four trials, going from easiest to hardest for the bike leg), so that’s not likely to be an issue. The fact that the distances were 20K-5K instead of 40K-10K is unfortunate. The authors do a song and dance about how the sprint distance is “growing in popularity” so that’s why they decided to study it, which seems absurd. I assume the real reason is that it would have been much harder to get volunteers to do that many 40K-10K efforts in succession. Also, it was a lab study done on stationary bikes with no wind resistance, and the triathletes were recreational — their average 5K time (not preceded by a bike ride) was 19:51.
Still, bearing all these things in mind, it’s a data point:
It is unclear if this relationship would hold for longer-style triathlon race formats, full triathlon races which also include a prior swim leg, races that involve a draft-legal cycle leg or with highly trained or elite triathletes. However, our results suggest that time lost on the cycle leg is unlikely to be made up on the run leg.
triathlon
In a post last month, I mentioned having a chance to chat with Simon Whitfield about his recent training camp in Portland with the Nike running groups coached by Alberto Salazar and Jerry Schumacher. This week’s Jockology column in the Globe and Mail explores some of the ideas Whitfield talked about — in particular the fact that the Portland groups are very precise in monitoring their training paces, and how that relates concepts in sports psychology like “deliberate practice”:
… The group Mr. Whitfield trained with in Portland included Simon Bairu of Regina, who earlier this month smashed the Canadian record for 10,000 metres by 13 seconds at a race in Palo Alto, Calif., running 27:23.63. Chris Solinsky, another member of the group, broke the U.S. record in the same race, and a third member of the Portland group also dipped below the old U.S. record.
“They’re so precise about their pacing,” Mr. Whitfield says. “We came home with the message that when a tempo run is supposed to be, let’s say, 3:05 [per kilometre] pace, then 3:03 pace is not a success. That’s a fail.”
Such precision may be daunting, but it’s a hallmark of “deliberate practice,” a concept advanced by Florida State University cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson and popularized in recent books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. The best way to master an activity is not simply to repeat it mindlessly over and over again, Dr. Ericsson argues, but to set specific goals and monitor how well you meet them.[READ THE FULL ARTICLE]
I also chatted to Lex Mauger, the lead author of a recent study on pacing in a 4-km cycling time-trial. The study showed that getting accurate pace feedback during a hard effort really does lead to better performances — something many athletes would have told you intuitively, but which had never been shown. In particular, pace feedback seems to be crucial in the early stages of a race, before you’ve settled into a rhythm.
cycling, sports psych, triathlon
A paper in last month’s International Journal of Sports Medicine takes a look at how much you slow down as you age, comparing the three triathlon disciplines. Researchers in France crunched data from the top ten finishers in each age group at the 2006 and 2007 world championships, for both Olympic-distance and Ironman triathlons. Since a picture is worth 1,000 words:
The top graph is for Olympic-distance, while the bottom graph is for Ironman. What sticks out is that cycling declines more slowly than running and swimming, and the researchers suggest a bunch of different explanations for this. One is that running and swimming rely more on fast-twitch muscle fibres, which atrophy more quickly than slow-twitch fibres. Another is simply that running is harder on the body, so older athletes have to spend less time running to avoid injuries, while cyclists are able to maintain higher training volumes as they age. There are also more subtle possibilities, such as the idea that identical declines in your power output would affect running more than cycling (since running speed is directly proportional to mechanical power, but cycling speed only proportional to the cube root of mechanical power).
aging, triathlon
Interesting article [LINK FIXED] on what intense biking does to your running form, by researchers at the Australian Institute of Sport and the University of Queensland, coming up in a future issue of the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport. There has been quite a bit of prior research on what happens when you run off the bike, generally showing that your running economy is worse than it would otherwise be — in other words, tired as you are, you also have to burn more energy to run at a given pace than you normally do. Various reasons for this have been proposed: you’re dehydrated, your breathing muscles are tired, you’re burning a higher proportion of fat because your carbohydrate stores are depleted. But it may also have something to do with running form, thanks to changes in neuromuscular control. That’s what this study set out to investigate, by having a group of 17 moderately trained triathletes do a pair of runs with and without a 45-minute high-intensity bike ride beforehand.
Unfortunately, the results don’t reveal any universal truths about what triathletes do wrong off the bike — but there are some interesting findings. First of all, everybody was different: some people had changes in running form, others didn’t; some had better running economy, others had worse. Crunching the data, the researchers find that the people whose running economy got worse had some things in common. When running after biking, these people tended to extend their knee and dorsiflex their ankle at the moment of ground contact a bit more than when they ran fresh. That makes them more likely to have a jarring heel strike, which wastes a bit of energy. Basically, when they start running after biking, they’re overstriding.
I’m not sure this really says much about fancy concepts like “neuromuscular fatigue,” but it does offer a useful warning about a pitfall that about half the subjects in the study fell into. Yes, you’re tired when you come off the bike, but overstriding isn’t going to get you to the finish line any sooner. (And one thing the researchers note is that their subjects were not elite triathletes, so this advice may be most relevant to less-experienced age-groupers.)
triathlon
I spent this morning down by the Sydney Opera House, watching the first leg of this year’s ITU World Championship Series. It was a lot of fun — the course was set up well for spectators, with a nice, short criterium course with lots of loops. The run felt like a Tour de France stage, with a three-man breakaway so far ahead of the main pack that you thought they’d never be caught. But just past the halfway mark, as the chase pack swarmed by, a Spanish coach beside me glanced at the contenders, nodded at the guy beside him, and said one word with absolute certainty: “Docherty.”
Sure enough, several kilometres and a few dramatic moves from French, Russian and American guys later, it was New Zealand’s Bevan Docherty who emerged at the front for the final run-in, with Simon Whitfield closing strongly to finish in fifth from a pack that was 11-strong with just a few kilometres to go. Great start to the season.
Which brings me to my point. I had the chance to chat with Whitfield last week for a forthcoming article — lots of fun to talk about training and hear about his new coach and his experiences running with Alberto Salazar and Jerry Schumacher’s Nike training groups in Portland, Oregon. More on this later, but one quick highlight: a key message that he came away with, particularly from Schumacher, was precision and control.
If they’re doing a tempo run where the pace is supposed to be 3:05 per kilometre, and you go out and run 3:03 per kilometre, that’s not a success. That’s a fail.
Obviously that’s easier said than done, especially when you’ve got a group of extremely competitive athletes training together. But no matter how many times you hear the rule “don’t race in training,” I think it’s still arguably the most common training mistake among endurance athletes — and I think coaches who give mixed messages share a big part of the blame. (If you tell your athletes to hit a certain pace and they go faster, do you give them positive or negative feedback?) So kudos to Schumacher for being clear about this.
running, triathlon