9-11 Training

Part of the reason that I chose this challenge was that it would test my knowledge of training. I came up with it in June and have been training like crazy ever since. Have I been training properly? I have no idea.

Thing is, because there are so many events of varying natures it has become very hard to figure the right way to train. I came up with something that I thought would be somewhat iron clad but have been altering it ever since.

Here's what I've been thinking:

Before Hans and Bob's birthday I  began to get back into shape. At first I was doing a lot of train running, then I hurt my ankle and began doing some easy bouldering for rehab. Close to Hans' birthday I got healthy and was doing a lot of running with some high-rep weight work at the gym and a little cycling. I got in pretty fit running shape.

The combination of the two challenges in less than two weeks definitely overtrained me some but, at least, I knew I had some good base fitness for endurance. When I concocted the 40-day event in July I had a pretty good base in some areas so I had to evaluate my fitness for each event.

I decided to concentrate on the events that would matter the most to me first and then work toward the others. This meant that I had to climb a lot more than I had been.

I figured that the 400 boulder problems and the 40 peaks would be the hardest so my training geared toward them. I started with three weeks of full-on foundation training, meaning long, slow distance and a lot of easy bouldering.

I followed this by doing around three weeks of hypertrophy, meaning interval running and interval bouldering. During this time I also had to mix in other sports. A lot of other sports. I would have at least one day a week in the weight room, the pool, doing skill stuff, and on the bike.

After this I stepped up my biking. I know that I won't be able to ride as much as I need so I try and spend  many days in the saddle, even if my rides are short. I also needed to start bouldering harder if I was to make the 40 V4's, so I have started to do some power work.

I started a training log but was varying my plans from week to week so I gave up on it. I kind of wish that I hadn't but, oh well, I don't feel like I'm being too accurate because I kind of make things up as I go depending upon how I feel each day. If I'm really tired and have a hard day scheduled then I back off because I'm paranoid of overtraining. In the past I have overtrained many times and the older you get the more you have to back off. I keep trying to remind myself that many athletes, especially endurance athletes, have cut their training in half and seen their times improve.

One interesting thing is that I was having some knee problems and went to Kevin Brown at Precision Biomechanics in Santa Barbara. From my symptoms he thought that I had a torn meniscus. He gave me a bunch of rehab exercises and I began to see improvements immediately. A few weeks later the pain was nearly gone and I had an MRI that showed no (or maybe a very minor) tear but a bunch of scar tissue in my hamstrings. At any rate, I didn't need surgery but this made me realize just how important stretching and other rehab work is as injury prevention. Kevin gave me some stabilizer muscle exercised and I've been doing them religiously and since, all of my chronic injuries (and there are quite a few) have gotten better.

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