There are only 9 weeks left until Kona. The IRONMAN world championship on the Big Island, Hawaii is for many an athlete the highlight of his or her career that one should enjoy. I am not talking about pro athletes, for them it is an obligation and in many ways not a question of joy. But for the many age groupers racing there should be joy. Be it as it may, it is hard work to get to Hawaii and it is hard work to finish there. Many currently linger along this very thin red line between overreaching and overtraining, and try to solve the riddle how to achieve peaking on time.
Endurance sports are very trendy and, so is triathlon for example. But how do we all who are busy all day long achieve the training volumes of 12 to 14 hours per week, a minimum that is assumed necessary to race a long distance triathlon race or a marathon? There are different approaches to what is considered efficient training. Some of the elite athletes are convinced that long training cycles are necessary to get into good form, while others favor qualitatively high-intensity training sessions. The proof of concept is still missing, because there are athletes in either group who are successful, as there are those who are not.
In my last post I was reflecting on body sense awareness, a complex topic that seems to me very essential, if you want to be able to retrieve peak performance at a given time. In sports it became normal routine to measure various parameters like heart rate, oxygen uptake, lactate, urea etc. Moreover you have devices like power meters that give you control of your watts output on the bike. The various devices used got integrated programs that pretend to give you more detailed information of your body's condition (lactate threshold, energy and calorie consumption, basal metabolic rate etc.). Did it ever occur to you that the data you receive are based on algorithms that are referring back to the mean of a sample and not to your individual body condition?
To get an insight into the process of recovery it is necessary to go a little bit into the physiology of muscle adaptation by training. There have been days when we were not having microscopes giving us a view on the micro-texture of this marvelous tissue. Back then people thought the muscle is not able adapt or recover. We had a similar idea about the muscle as we had not very long ago about neurones, either proved to be wrong!
November is probably the only time of the year where athletes have got the mental strength to read a book that is not only entertaining but instructive. Triathlon is a very consuming sport, it takes a lot of energy also from the brain, not only as a pro, but as an age grouper with ambition too. Because job and family come on top of training.
After a total break-down of our Internet connection we are back again. In 2 hours we leave from Santa Monica to Kona, The Making of "Bike ride along Santa Monica coastline"
Yesterday we accompanied our biest athletes Chris McCormack, Ronnie Schildknecht and Sebastian Kienle along the Santa Momica coastline and through the Agoura Hills North of Los Angeles. It was a wonderful, but hot day. Here some impressions from our shooting activities.
Chris, Ronnie, Stefan and Sebastian
Shooting from the various perspectives
Shooting from the rear of the car
Trying not to fall off the car
I found a very interesting article about the harmful effects of painkillers in the New York Times. Especially now, where so many of you are training extremely hard for the climax of the year in Kona, the Ironman world championship, these research results maybe of interest for you and, may even be helpful for your preparations.
Painkillers as various study were able to prove are widely used in endurance athletes. Most of the athletes take drug like ibuprofen because they want to avoid pain during a competition. At all levels and in a wide variety of sports athletes swear by their painkillers. A study published earlier this month on the website of the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that, at the 2008 Ironman Triathlon in Brazil, almost 60 percent of the racers reported using non-steroidal anti-inflammatory painkillers (or NSAIDs, which include ibuprofen) at some point in the three months before the event, with almost half downing pills during the race itself. In another study, about 13 percent of participants in a 2002 marathon in New Zealand had popped NSAIDs before the race. A study of professional Italian soccer players found that 86 percent used anti-inflammatories during the 2002-2003 season.
Famous physiologist David Nieman published a study that showed the effect of ibuprofen on immunity and muscle recovery. Ibuprofen had a significant negative effect on both. And the worst of it, the painkiller did not even help to reduce pain during a race or decrease muscle soreness after it. David Nieman belongs to those scientists who first discovered the outstanding importance of a healthy immune system for athletes.
Sebastian Kienle, große Nachwuchshoffnung des Deutschen Triathlon