The Purpose

Sorry for not getting a post up last night. If I am honest I was just about to and then I fell asleep on the couch. Whoops.

Yesterday morning I had a nice little reminder about specificity.

One of my little mantras to my athletes is that every session should have a point. The point might be hard efforts, it might be long and steady, it could be technique, but it should have a purpose, rather than "just doing exercise". Once you know the point of a session then when it comes to doing the session you can keep that purpose in mind to help in the quality of your execution.

My session yesterday morning was one of those long steady ones, no efforts, just a long period of steady work, the initial goal had been 2 hours, but in the end I was a little under than. For paddling sessions I use a HR monitor to help me maintain training focus on intensity, I know for this kind of session I need to maintain a HR between 140 and 150bpm. I also have a rough idea of what speed that will translate to when I am fit, although HR is the focus usually.

While training yesterday it become quickly obvious that I was going a lot slower than expected. I am still not too sure why and I am not reading much into it at this stage, it was only one session after all, but the speeds were lower than I would usually see. However, while I was going slow, the heart rate was about right. The temptation was to push harder to go quicker, go as fast as I usually would, however, that would have pushed my heart rate above the desired training zone. I really had to pull myself back and ask myself "what is the point of this session". The point of course was to go long and steady, not to push up into the higher intensity zones and toast myself. In order to work all the physiological systems, higher intensity sessions are of course important, but so are the long steady ones and that was the point of the session yesterday.

With the purpose of the session fixed firmly in mind I accepted that the session was simply going to be a slower one and got on with it. Mission accomplished.