Pushing through

Great session today, riding along with a mate of mine Gary as he executed a rather flawless Tempo Run.

Gary is currently at the end of a fairly solid three week block of Ironman training, and so heading into this session today he was quite fatigued. In fact Gary had cut his swim short yesterday at Swim Smooth due to this fatigue. As such, he wasn't really sure how this session was going to go.

Given his level of fatigue, and how he was feeling heading into the session, it would be tempting to say that Gary should have missed this morning and rested instead, giving himself a chance to recover a little.

However, Gary is quite a high achieving athlete with lofty goals. Achieving those goals requires quite a bit of work, including training when you are fatigued. As such, going out and giving this session a go today was the right thing for Gary to do. To a certain extent doing well in long distance triathlon is a game of pushing on and consistently doing the work. That will often mean getting yourself out of bed and moving when the body is really telling you that it doesn't want to, which is exactly that Gary did today. In the end an Ironman is a very challenging event, so it makes sense that the training is equally as challenging.

The trick with pushing on and training when fatigued is knowing when you are tired but okay to train and when you should instead admit defeat and cut the session short or pull back the intensity. For Gary this morning he was running by perceived effort, ie how he felt. He was comparing how he felt to how fast he was going to determine whether the session was going well. The run for Gary today was a tempo session and Gary is experienced enough to know how that should feel. He is also experienced enough to know if a session doesn't feel right and ease back accordingly.

In the end, after Gary warmed up into the session it actually went really well and he ended up with a great tempo run. If he hadn't decided to push on he would have missed out on a very effective workout and a great confidence boost. Today was definitely one of those days where pushing through was the right thing to do.

I am a less experienced runner than Gary and so for me I often used to go by my heart rate rather than perceived effort. If I was feeling fatigued I would usually head out for a session, but if my heart rate didn't correlate with the power or pace that I was expecting then I would ease back into the correct intensity zones rather that pushing on blindly. Each session usually has a prescribed intensity and if training when fatigued, the exertion can be a better guide than pace or power alone.

When it comes to training, we will often talk about being conservative. Better to err on the easy side than push too hard and get injured or sick. This is true, particularly for inexperienced athletes who are less familiar with their boundaries and are often tempted to push beyond them. However, as people drive to improve, a certain amount of pushing will be necessary. Helping people know just how far they can safely push is the real challenge.