Coaching Day

I just reaslised that while I wrote this last night I didn't actually hit publish. Whoops. I guess that is wy you don't write when you are tired. Anyway, I thought I might as well publish it, so lucky you, today you get two posts for the price of one.

A bit of a training and coaching day tomorrow as Thursday's usually are these days

The day is going to start off with the Front Runner Tempo bike session. Long 70.3 pace efforts providing the squad with a good chance to build their long course triathlon engines. For the session tomorrow we are going to head down to a common time trail loop near one of the local beaches. It is a fairly challenging loop with a number of solid climbs making up the lap. The climbs aren't particularly steep but they are relatively long and a bit unrelenting, just the thing for tempo efforts. I suspect it is going to be a bit of a leg burner morning for them.

For me it is less of a leg burner and more of just a great chance to get out on the bike. I am finding the bike is a good place to coach the session from. If I speed up, slow down and wait a bit I can usually spend a bit of time with nearly everyone at the session which I think works out pretty well. Of course there are always a couple of people who are just too quick for me now and I have to catch up with them either before or after the session, but on the whole the coach from a bike thing seems go okay. Loads of fun too.

The afternoon coaching session will be down the track with a squad from Stadium Tri Club. Hopefully the track will be open this time (I have been told it should be). The folks in this squad have a little bit of an unpleasant surprise coming their way a Coopers Threshold Test. This test involves running as far as possible in 12 minutes and it just so happens that the track is the perfect placed to do it as it is highly repeatable. As you can imagine though, given it is a threshold test, it rather hurts.

The head coach at Stadium has asked me to put everyone through the test to check the progress of their threshold paces. For some people this test will be a re calibration and for others it will be the first test they have ever done. Whilst the test is a painful one, it is also important. Once everyone has their test results it gives them a great tool for judging their own training efforts as well as tracking progress and planning races. Once you have an idea of your threshold running pace all other intensities can be calculated from it and then that can be used to build training programs, it is key metric that we use at Front Runner. The test may be a painful one, but it yields some pretty powerful results.

Should be a fun day out.