During the build towards Chinook Half in June I consciously made a decision not to go for broke during the buildup with training. I could meet my target volumes etc and hit key workouts without having to really go to any limits of what I was capable of doing. I got close a few times, holding on to the lead at the Pigeon Lake road race was a serious effort, one of my 20 km runs following a full day volunteering out in the sun finished with somewhat sore hip flexors and the final 60 kms of my century ride with Ben and Stefan south of Calgary the day after the 30km Time Trial all brought me close to reaching the limit of how much I was capable of doing. During the buildup for the Calgary 70.3 race I made the decision to let myself go a little harder, be ambitious with my paces (especially on the run, big guys running fast can be hard on knees so lighting it up on the run is rare.) and hopefully reap the benefits. Staying conservative in training prior to the Chinook Half was necessary for two reasons; first, I didn’t want to peak too early in the summer, and second, I could not risk getting injured as time off would be far more detrimental to the early buildup than it would be to take it too easy.

Going all the way to one’s limits usually makes for an interesting story, and they usually let you learn a few things about yourself while you’re at it. The past two weekends I certainly did take things to the limits of my ability. I had and still have no guarantees that this is going to pay off significantly better than staying slightly below my maximal limit but I feel like I’ve got one opportunity to try it this season and can really try to take advantage of it. The ability to do a maximal capacity workout during training is not terribly more difficult that getting calculatedly close to the limit, in fact it might even be easier. Knowing how far and how fast I can run or bike and then getting awfully close to that ceiling requires a rather calculated approach. Deciding to run into the ceiling can be done in one of two ways when the training goal is an endurance event. The first has probably less training benefit, go out at a half-hour intensity and try to hold on for two hours. That will run you very rapidly into notifying yourself that you reached your limit. The second is the method that I wanted to try and do and is a bit more philosophical, especially when I’m building these workouts into a weekly structure. The idea is to set yourself up to lower the ceiling of what you should be able to do by stacking in workouts so that you arrive at the key workout in an already somewhat fatigued state. Then try to perform that two hour workout at a two hour intensity as if you were not tired. What would have brought me close to that upper ceiling now puts me past what I’m actually able to do and I have to deal with the consequences of it, hopefully safely and hopefully not totally catastrophically.

This second concept could be based on reaching that ceiling by one of two limiters. The first is based on a plan of putting muscle fatigue into your legs to enhance your ability to reach a muscular endurance challenge without straining your cardio or nutrition to the same extent. This ‘fresh body, tired legs’ should enhance the mental ability to suffer through the tired and sore legs. It should be important while doing this sort of workout to make sure that when things start to get really sore, which the training plan was designing to happen, that it is muscle soreness and not joint pain that you’re pushing through. The second version of reaching the maximal capacity ceiling is a trickier one to do. The idea would be to try to erode some of your (cardio) fitness without at the same time running into a muscular strength/endurance limiter at least to some extent. This means that the key workout for this little game has got to be a rather intense one, that you should be pushing your fitness limit and ultimately wind up in a situation where you cannot maintain your heart rate. Mental fortitude in my experience seems tied to the state of non-muscular training stress so it makes sense (to me at least) that this is going to be among the hardest workouts to motivate yourself through. Having a calculated reasoning that motivation may be low seems to be good enough for myself to make up for that motivation, it’s mostly a matter of saying ’sure I don’t really want to right now but that’s the point’. Getting through that last workout becomes a philosophical challenge. ‘I don’t want to do this right now, but I need to finish this training block’. It takes some serious work to get there before you start the key workout so by then it’s just a matter of following through, and it feels good afterwards.

I have three such ‘ceiling workouts’ planned on three consecutive weeks during my final peak. Due to the fact that they’re scheduled during my final training block I have got to make sure that this stuff isn’t done at speeds that are just tired and slow. These workouts should be done fast as right now is when I have built the base for the last 8 months so that now I can add speed. Two of them are done and one remains, I also managed to get in a bonus unintentional brush with my (cardiac) fitness maximum while trying to prepare for the first muscular endurance ceiling workout. Running is clearly weaker for me than cycling and I am pretty sure that my (cardio) fitness is in better form than my muscular endurance so I wanted to get two muscular endurance maximal efforts and one fitness maximal effort, all on the run.

• The first workout was to be a muscular endurance focused run on a Sunday following a long and quick ride on the Saturday. I wanted to do the run without running into a fitness barrier to continue and hoped to crack 25 kms before my legs really called it quits and I slowed down. Saturday I headed out with Stefan from the Triathlon club with 200+ kms planned and we started out fast. We had a bit of a tailwind and Stefan really wanted to make the most of it. I notified him that I knew I couldn’t go that fast for 200kms and didn’t want to run into trouble on the way into town. That is something I know I can’t do, it’s like trying to reach the ceiling by the aiming way past it, a method I do not believe has proper training benefits. I had planned the route to be mostly flat on the way out and include some hills between 100 and 160 kms on the way back. We flew through the first 94 kms averaging 40.8 kph including my request to slow down. The return into the headwind was of course difficult, I had overcooked it on the way out and the hills and headwind on the return trip were too much. I told Stefan to go off ahead and I would take a break but he didn’t know really where we were so I forced myself to continue after a 3 minute eating break at 150 kms. Once back on familiar roads after another half hour I could convince him to go on ahead and I stopped. I really stopped, sat in the ditch and put my head on my knees and closed my eyes. Half an hour later I had recouped enough to get going again. An unintentional encounter with reaching the fitness maximum. Suffice to say the next day I had put enough muscle fatigue into my legs that it wasn’t terribly difficult to run myself into an muscle endurance limited ceiling. I did it split between two runs to ensure I wasn’t going to be at a fitness maximum during the run workouts. The first I ran about 10 kms and did it fast to ensure that I was maxing out the legs, approximately race pace or maybe a bit quicker (best case scenario race pace I guess). The second run I did after a solid rest and another 2 meals. That one was relatively slow but I did manage to keep on trucking through the sore legs. Keeping the pace up demanded a ton of focus and was really the eye opener of the workout. When you’re focused on something it’s not all that difficult to complete it despite the difficulty in actually doing it.

• The fitness limiter workout would prove to be more eventful. I was hoping to load together a bunch of high intensity work without blitzing myself on duration and then complete a long run at the end of it, ideally I’d run out of fitness during the final run of the block. I knew how to run out of fitness thanks to Stefan’s outrageous pace on the bike the previous week, but I wanted to do it on the run and knew that I had to do most of the lead-up workouts on the bike so as to prevent injury. I back-end loaded my week to put 4 days of intensity together: Wednesday 1.5 hours on the bike including 1 hour at threshold, with a 10km brick run. Thursday I followed my swim with a 10 mile run at race pace. Friday I did two one hour rides building to threshold intensity at the end of each (split up with an open water swim of 1/2 hour). Saturday I still needed to fit in my long ride so opted to do a significantly harder effort on the return than on the way out. 100 miles: check! Sunday I did a mountain bike race of 1:20 duration with a good 1/2 hour warmup. I decided all the power spikes from a MTB race would actually probably help me with this fitness push concept so did race after a decent amount of deliberation. Sunday evening I set out to try my hand at what I knew was going to be a tough run, I wanted 20 kms if I could. Turns out it was a very tough run.

  I set out hoping to run a tad slower than my planned HIM run pace because I knew I would fail too soon if I tried to hold race pace. The first 8 kms took some effort, but I was content with the pace I was managing. My breathing started to get out of control when I headed up a long gradual hill during the sixth mile but I was able to recover or so I thought on the downhill. Once I hit the flats though, I found myself in trouble. In my head I was starting to question my ability to make it home. I started to ache in my stomach. I started to pick up the effort level but I could not raise my heartrate and I could not speed up back to my original pace. Things started to nosedive as I really started to slow down and I was working harder and harder despite my falling heartrate. Two miles from home I got some water from a fountain and it started to slosh around in my stomach, I could really tell I was in survival mode and my breathing was going about the rate I would expect for a 170 BPM effort but looking at my HRM I was only going about 125. About a mile from home I decided I was done, the final hill up to my house defeated me and I walked it in to the finish. For the first time since early during my marathon training (Jan) I was able to reach a fitness limiter on the run. It took 4 days of solid efforts to get me there and I’m pretty confident that it can’t happen during any one day race if I prep for it properly. Here’s the pace/HR/RPE plots for the run.

  

• This coming weekend I’ll be riding 220 kms on Saturday and 220 kms on Sunday, there is a monstrous amount of climbing to do on the bike which should help generate muscle fatigue. I have an almost guarantee that I’ll be doing it fast by the nature of the two guys who I’m going with (Stefan again! and Ben Adam (2:16 half ironman bike split two weeks ago)). Monday is my final workout prior to the taper and fully expect that it will be a muscular limited cruise through the river valley. Depending on my capabilities following the two strenuous days on the bike I plan to try and keep it flat and fast to keep strain off my breathing as climbing is more of a fitness stressor than a flat cruising speed.