After the Bayshore 70.4 triathlon last weekend I needed a good recovery week to start the final push to Santa Rosa 140.6, which is now 8 (!) weeks away. A recovery week while having such a big race ahead of you takes a lot of discipline, something I am certainly still learning. I took two complete days off from any strenuous exercise, and instead spent a good amount on deep stretching and foam rolling. By day 3, my legs were slowly starting to feel fresher again and I got back on the bike for an easy 20mile pedal and swam 3000yds with a pull-buoy.
Getting back into running takes a bit longer for me. By 5 days post-race my two run workouts this week were still limited to around 4 miles each. Compared to swimming and biking, where the majority of your body weight is supported either by water or by the bike frame, running requires you to carry all of your weight (and with a low area of impact to boot), which can be tough on recovering muscles and joints.
Aside from distance/pace, your heart-rate (HR) will be an important metric to use in the recovery week. I invested in a Garmin HR strap early on so that I could approach my training campaign a bit more structured (see the T-12week update). HR is a good tool to use because distance/pace does not differentiate between the types of terrain you are traversing (hilly vs. flat), but HR does. Another good tool to use on the bike would be a power meter, but ill describe that in its own post soon.
In order to use HR effectively, you need to find out what your discipline specific Maximum HR (MHR) is. There are many good resources online describing how to do just that so I wont describe it here. One of the better articles can be found here. The process of getting your MHR is hard and it will hurt. You are going to nuke your legs so it’s recommended to not do this every week and to do it after a nice rest day. Together with your Resting HR (RHR), the Karvonen formula provides a means to calculate “HR Zones”. When I did my last MHR test in early February, my MHRs for the bike and the run were 178bpm and 188bpm respectively. My resting HR at that time was 50bpm. My effort calculation from 40-100% is shown below.
For my biking and running this week, I primarily stayed around zones 1 and 2 respectively. On the bike I averaged around 126bpm (averaging about 160W), while with running I averaged right around 140bpm (averaging 8:30min/mile).
In addition to using HR during a recovery week to monitor effort, HR is also a useful tool when building cardiovascular efficiency, especially on the run. If you target staying within a certain HR zone during the run, you will initially limit yourself to a slower pace, but as you improve your cardiovascular capabilities, you will increase your pace within the same HR zone. This translates to a more efficient effort throughout all disciplines. When I started using HR zones in training back in November, I was putting in an average pace of 9:15min/mile staying well within zone 2. This has improved to roughly 8:30min/mile for the same “effort” in March.
Training numbers for this week are below. To compensate for the limited running distance this week I pushed a little more on the bike and the swim (crossing 10,000yds in one week for the first time!). I also did not do my usual 2x1hr block of lower body weight training to aid in recovery of my legs.
