Defying Convention, and Loving It

I like no nonsense high ROI stuff. Work, play, personal – doesn’t matter. I like performance benchmarks.

My career depends upon it. In an industry that too often hides behind legal documents and errors & omissions insurance, my group delivers performance guarantees. We can’t fall prey to doing things just because popular trends or conventional wisdom say so. Our decisions are made on case-by-case analyses: On data that we’ve measured or our vendors have measured and, then, specifically applied to our clients’ particular situations. By doing things that way we uncover a lot of myths. We prove a lot of industry-wide sacred cows wrong (not our goal, it just works out that way). Many within the green building industry aren’t ready to accept our assertions because they sometimes defy convention, so we’re left serving a minority of intensely loyal clients; a loyalty developed out of proven performance.

So it is with my multisport training.

Conventional triathlon training wisdom would have me coming out of the winter with a huge “base” comprised of long hours of easy swimming, cycling, and running. Most training guides and >$500 per month coaches preach this old school philosophy, saying the method provides metabolic benefits like increased capillary density and fat burning capacity. I’m sure that’s great for folks who choose to burn 15 to 20 hours (or more) per week in pursuit of athletic domination. I don’t want to do that. I have a career, a family, and like to stay connected to my community. This triathlon thing keeps me sane and provides an appropriate competitive outlet, but it’s ultimately just for fun.

Enter the coaches and athletes at Endurance Nation. I just completed a 20 week “out season” plan that had me cycling and running very hard for six to seven hours a week - Pretty countercultural in endurance sport circles. At the conclusion of that 20 week period, my cycling threshold power is:

• 20% higher than it was at the beginning of the program.
• Just 5 watts shy of my all time high.
• Just 12 watts short of my lifetime peak goal.

Additionally, today I ran the hilly Caesar Rodney half marathon in Wilmington, DE. I broke my previous personal record for that distance by more than 2-1/2 minutes. I didn’t taper for the race and I did my final painful bike test less than 24 hours earlier.

Not bad for a 42 year old fella on the first full day of spring, eh? I’d say the guys at EN are on to something. Wonder how strong I’ll be this summer?

5K Madness

When my Afib issue surfaced in the fall of 2007 I thought my days of hard racing might be over forever. Last season taught me that clearly wasn’t the case.

The Endurance Nation training strategy includes relatively short but highly intense workouts throughout the winter months. We use 5K races for running fitness benchmarking. The last two seasons had me sitting on the race sidelines, “guesstimating” my running fitness, while I learned to manage my heart electrical problems. So this season I was really itching to train and benchmark the EN way. I signed up for five 5K road races. Today was the final of those, the third of three Frozen Foot series races in Elizabethtown. I was happy to walk away with the third place age group medal for the race series. In all I placed three times over the course of the five races. My first road running medals since I was a teenager. Pretty cool.

My times progressively improved throughout the winter. I started at 21:14 in early November and finished today with a 20:20. My pre-season goal was to break the 20-minute mark by the first day of spring. I didn’t quite make it, but the aggressive goal kept me focused. I still hope to break that mark at Lancaster’s Race Against Racism in late April. Performance goals keep me focused and I have more fun when I set them.

My mom passed away the day before my fourth race – just three weeks ago. I woke up Sunday morning and felt like I’d been whacked over the head. As you might imagine the prior day was quite an endurance event in its own right, but on an entirely different plane. I was at her side when she died just 12 hours earlier. After a brief appearance at church I decided to run that day. I wanted a sense of normalcy. It wasn’t easy and I almost quit about 10 minutes in out of apathy, but somehow I summoned the energy to keep moving forward. My mom certainly did not teach me to quit. She was a fighter.

All that pain for a stupid 20-minute 5K? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m no Ryan Hall. When it comes to endurance sports I’m the guy who metaphorically busts his ass just to make the team. And that’s what I love about it. The beauty is in the pursuit of excellence, in being “the man who is actually in the arena,” as Teddy Roosevelt said. The lessons of mental tenacity taught through endurance sports translate to all facets of life.