failure is the chance to do better next time

My fortune cookie this weekend said failure is the chance to do better next time.

As with life, so with sports. To reach out beyond what we are accustomed to, we have to (at least, gingerly) explore the discomfort zone.

Recently, I've been having problems getting my body to accept something beyond that 10K run at 7.0 mph, which I know I can repeat fairly comfortably (see Natural Training).

So I tried pushing things a bit last week.

However, running at 8.0 mph only got me 6 minutes before entering the red (anaerobic) zone (On the edge).

So I tried again on Saturday, this time at 7.5 mph.

As you can see, I basically tried to run in blocks of 10 minutes at 7.5 mph (1.33 miles) to keep the heart rate (HR) from entering the red zone. Then walk for 5 minutes inbetween to allow the HR to drop.

How do we evaluate this? Well, a measure of fitness that's commonly employed is to see how fast the HR drops during recovery (the faster it drops the fitter you are). What happened was this:

1. At the end of the first block, my HR was 164 bpm. It dropped nearly 60 bpm to 106 bpm during the recovery. An encouraging sign.
2. 2nd block, I started to run into trouble. My HR hit 170 bpm by the end of the 10 minutes. This is in the anaerobic zone for me. The HR dropped 55 bpm to 115 bpm during the 2nd recovery zone.
3. 3rd block, I knew I was done. After 8 mins @ 7.5 mph, I was already back up at 170 bpm. So I shut it down.

My body's wimpy response to the 0.5 mph (1 km/hr) increase was kinda disappointing. Total fail.

I tried to do these 10 minute blocks as a natural interval workout, hoping to get my 10K in. Five 10 minute blocks would have gotten me nearly 11 km. Unfortunately, I stopped just shy of 3 blocks.

As any cyclist who has trained using a powermeter knows, time spent in the red zone is always costly. You have a fixed and limited number of minutes in that zone for your body. Every minute spent there will cost you aerobically in the end. And distance running is all about aerobic capacity.

So I knew every minute I spent at 170 bpm (rather than at 160 bpm) would hit me hard on the next block to come. And as I hit 170 bpm just 7-8 minutes into the 3rd 10 minute block, to paraphrase my friend Barry Dattel, there's no way, no how I could have completed the 5 blocks I had planned.

I have my excuses ready of course: it was a busy first week. I taught 4 times. Many meetings. And prepared and gave a colloquium talk as well. So by Friday I was all in the red, so to speak. Plus my body is not yet in marathon shape. Blah, blah, blah... but ultimately unconvincing.

After the frustration with the treadmill, I completely over-compensated and took it out on the spinning bike. This was workout #8 below:

I spun 615 kcal in 43 minutes (rate of about 860 kcal/hr). Average HR on the bike was 142 bpm, significantly higher than my normal relaxed time on the bike. In addition to the 467 kcal from the treadmill, the total kcal was nearly 1100 kcal. Yes, the workload was a bit high for a short workout. (1500 kcal would be a medium workout in my book.) But hey, it was a Saturday.

Taking a step back, the fortune cookie's optimistic interpretation of events, namely failure is the chance to do better next time provides perspective. We should see opportunity in every failure. There's a silver lining in every cloud and all that.

Case in point, this week an aftermarket part was not working properly anymore in my car.

Monday morning, I dropped my car off at the place that originally installed the offending part, but I had nobody to give me a ride to work.

I brought out my race bike, which has scarcely turned a wheel in anger since PacTour Elite Southern Transcontinental - and that was back in 2007, nearly 4 years ago (see Day 17).

And I rode the five miles or so to work in 100F heat. To my surprise, I felt fine. Arriving at the office, I smiled and thought: hmm, maybe I am not doing so bad after all. 106F for the afternoon trip back. But hey, round trip, it'll be ten miles. Good preparation for tonight's tilt at the treadmill.

Epilogue

As I promised, I tried again today after work.

Monday's results are obviously significantly better than Saturday's. Instead of three 10 minute blocks at 7.5 mph, I got nearly four 10 minute blocks in at 7.5 mph. (And getting in the target 5th can't be far away.) As a result I burned 615 kcal on the treadmill instead of 467 kcal on Saturday. Plus another 321 kcal on the spin bike afterwards gave me a satisfactory Monday total of 936 kcal. I call that a good start to the week.

Obviously, there are no scientifically valid improvements in aerobic capacity that are realizable in only 3 days.

The red line is the heart rate.

1. As the graph shows, I reached 165 bpm at the end of the first block. It dropped to 110 bpm (55 bpm delta) on recovery.
2. 2nd block, I reached 170 bpm, dropping to 119 bpm (51 bpm recovery delta).
3. 3rd block, I reached 172 bpm, dropping to 125 bpm (47 bpm recovery delta).
4. 4th block, I hit 172 bpm by minute 7, so I shut it down at minute 8. If I had persevered, the recovery would have been worse again.

These HR numbers are much as the same as on Saturday. There is no training effect possible so quickly.

So why was I able to last longer 2nd time around? Well, immediate gains are the result of neuromuscular adaption to running at 7.5 vs 7.0 mph. Basically, the muscles in the legs first get used to firing at an increased rate.
(Incidentally, same thing is true for weight room workouts. Initial gains cannot be from muscle size adaptation.)

The other effect is learning to survive at the higher heart rate (HR). Back when I used to train on the bicycle, I called it "learning to live in the 170s", i.e. getting used to the HR staying in the 170s bpm range for an extended amount of time. Of course, as aerobic improvement accrues, the sustained HR will drop for any fixed speed.

on the edge

On the edge of beginning a new semester (tomorrow I begin teaching), today is a last chance to get a triple workout in.

I ran on the treadmill, hopped onto the Spin bike, and finished with a 2 hour table tennis training session all in one evening after work. I'd probably be lucky to get a single short workout in every other day once things are in full swing around here.

On my previous blog entry (natural training), I mentioned that now that I can knock out a 10K run comfortably, it was time to bump up the speed and see how far that can take me.

It was time to put my money where my mouth is.

I began with a 10 minute warm-up, basically walking at 3.0 mph to get the circulation going but including a 2 min 7.0 mph rev up of my cardio engine.

Then I bumped the speed up to 8.0 mph on the treadmill (1.0 mph more than I've been running at recently). The Nike+ download reported an average pace of 7'13" min/mile but as you can see I didn't quite manage to complete mile one.

Adding in a 5 minute cooldown, with the warm-up that's a 20 minute workout. Very short, but since I went anaerobic, it's not wise to push it.

The HR graph tells the real story.

The average HR was 154 bpm (a fairly low number, I sustained an average of 161 bpm on the comfortable 10K workout) but this is totally misleading.

By minute 6, my HR had busted through my comfort zone. As you can see, I hit 169 bpm and the pace felt unsustainable. In the discomfort zone, I probably could have pushed it for a bit longer, but since I'm following the natural training method, I shut it down.
(The idea is that without forcing myself to follow a formula, I should be able to naturally adapt and delay the onset of unsustainability significantly by simply repeating this 8.0 mph workout once a week.)

However, since I only burned 99 kcal in 6 minutes, it was onto the spin bike. So I tapped out an extra 458 kcal in just over half an hour under the video guidance of the ultra-cool video dude with hair gel who never seems to sweat during the ride:

After that, I managed a good 2 hour table tennis training session. And the luxury of this third workout of the evening was only made possible because I shut down the 8.0 mph treadmill workout before I managed to tire out and trash my legs. As Dave Edmunds sings (see YouTube):

Midnight, I'm a-waiting on the 1205
Hoping it'll take me just a little farther down the line
Moonlight, you're just a heartache in disguise
Won't you keep my heart from breaking
If it's only for a very short time
...

Like that orange Nittaku training ball in the first picture (which incidentally came to a rest of its own accord in that position), I'm living on the edge hoping it'll take me just a little farther down the line...

natural training

Usually, I train with some goal and set intermediate goals along the way. For example, in running, one simply increases mileage a little each week. That way, the body is given time to adapt and injuries are less likely. Then at the end of a few months, run that goal event: usually a marathon. Magazine training plans are usually like that.

However, one doesn't necessarily need to be a slave to a pre-planned training regime. While it is true one must continually push a bit in order not to stagnate, one could also let it happen naturally, i.e let your body set the ramp factor.

For example, consider the above graph. I do a short workout twice a week at the gym (Mondays and Thursdays) immediately after work. I try to keep the total workout to a modest 1000-1200 kcal. Any more than that, it's not a short workout because I may not be fresh the next day.

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Weekend
short run #1	ping pong	ping pong	short run #2	rest	long

(Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I need to hop around the table for ping pong, so my legs can't be heavy or trashed. Actually, I could do a heavy workout on Thursday since Friday is my rest day.)

Anyway, here's the theory: you run as much as you feel you can comfortably do twice a week. The difference is this: under my old training regime, I'd finish the planned distance no matter what: I'd use a bit of mental willpower and gut it out if necessary. Sounds a bit old-fashioned. With this new scheme, I do the same total workout (in terms of kcal) so I don't need to feel guilty I'm slacking off.

I simply just move the workout to the spinning bike (to burn off the remaining required kcal) as soon as I feel I'm having to utilize willpower to stay on the treadmill. (And since I used to be a serious ultra-distance cyclist, the spin bike portion takes zero willpower and is always easy to complete - after all, I'm mostly sitting down.)

"The treadmills: the blue zone"

"The spinning bikes: the red zone"

So the blue bits on the graph are from my treadmill, and the red zones are from the spin bike. Together, the kcal stack up as shown on the y-axis. For example, you can see I only ran for 310 kcal (for 20 minutes) for the first workout on the graph, but then topped it up with 420 kcal on the spin bike. By session #7 (last Thursday) I burnt 740 kcal on the treadmill (I ran a bit over 10 km), and I only did 310 kcal on the spin bike: total just over 1000 kcal. Since I am getting progressively fitter on the run, so it takes up a progressively larger slice of the workout. The key is that the ramp up is dictated by how I feel rather than sticking to some formula.

So in 7 sessions, I'm up from lasting 20 minutes comfortably on the treadmill to over 50 minutes (at the same speed). All well and good, but how do you know when to get off that treadmill? Obviously, it's easy to decide if you are running flat out. You get off because you can't hold the pace anymore. But what if you are running at an easier pace? Well, I use my heart rate (HR) and perceived exertion (RPE) to decide.

As documented in a previous entry (see iPod Nano 6G), I use an iPod Nano with the Nike+ kit. Not only do I get to listen to my specially-prepared run music playlist, it also records the pace and my heart rate. For example, here's session #7 (from last Thursday).

As you can see, it reports an (effective) flat line for the pace as expected since I set the treadmill to an easy 7.0 mph and never touch the controls during the workout. (Small variations are probably due to momentary changes in stride as I grab some water or due to limitations of the Nike+ transmitter.) The HR graph is more interesting though:

As you can see, my HR ramps up fast and then settles down, averaging 161 beats per minute (bpm). This is an aerobically sustainable level for me. There is some tilt upwards to the graph (as I slowly dehydrate and retain body heat). I think I end up around the 164 bpm level.

I could have kept it going but I had completed the target 10K (6.2 miles).

In addition, my left ankle was dripping with blood (see left) from chafing. My running was so relaxed muscle-wise, occasionally the right heel would scrape the left ankle. I have to control that right heel movement a bit more in future. But it's good my center of gravity was tightly localized.

If my HR keeps rising, it will eventually move into the anaerobic zone (unsustainable). So we can use a HR limit (e.g. 165 bpm) plus RPE (e.g. "damn, I feel terrible!") to decide when to stop. Otherwise, I'd push myself deep into the red zone - which would be a pyrrhic victory of sorts. In other words, unworthwhile and actually counterproductive since I won't be able to recover fresh for the next day.

A quick word on the spinning bikes. I really like the latest generation.

The spinning bikes are a pleasure to use. These newest ones have a large touch screen. I can follow the very cool (recorded) video of the guy. If he gets out of the saddle, I follow his lead. If he jumps, I jump. I subconsciously follow his pedaling cadence. And at the end, when he stretches, I just follow him. The electronics provide a suggested HR zone. However, since it's a spinning bike, I get to set the resistance knob.

Here is an example of a workout. I rode for 42 minutes and burnt off 530 kcal. I spun at an average cadence of 91 (no mashing). And my average HR is 130 bpm - much lower than on the run, an indicator that it was an easy 530 kcal for me.

Now that I've gotten up to my 10K the comfortable way, what's next? After all, as I mentioned at the beginning, one must continually push a bit in order not to stagnate.

Since I do this workout twice a week, the key then is to bifurcate my efforts.

• For workout one, I can bump the speed up to 7.5 mph or 8.0 mph and start from 20 minutes again (or until my HR goes in the red zone) to build speed.
• And I can simply run for longer for workout two. For example, back in May before I lost my fitness, I tapped out a 1 hour 45 minute run at 7.0 mph (see A half marathon). Alternatively, it's better to do the longer run outside (as soon as it dips below 95-100F in the afternoons in Tucson).

Curiously enough, I was not particularly happy with that half marathon run back then. At this point, I'd be ecstatic to be able to nail that down. It's all relative... :)