There's always those joke lists that start out with "you might be a redneck if..." or "you might be a yuppie if..."
In the spirit of not taking any of this too seriously, I'm quite confident that any sort "you might be over-committed to a hobby if..." would hit a little close to home.
You might be over committed to a hobby if...9 days of nothing but hard training in the desert is your idea of a vacation.
With Ironman Coeur d'Alene (someday I hope to spell that right on the first try!) just 5 weeks away, I headed down to Palm Springs for the Counterpart Coaching (CpC) May training camp. This is the same camp I did last July, 5 weeks before Ironman Canada 2007. My coach is affiliated with CpC, with his buddy Mitch Gold being the main force behind it.
You might be over-committed to a hobby if...it's your main source of broadening your social circle. Last year's camp was great - not just for the training but for the great friends I made there. As adults, we don't often get a chance to spend extended time with people who share common interests. Even in the work environment, time together is intermittent and haphazard. What's great about camp (really) is that you spend over a week around a set of people almost 24/7. It's a very bonding experience and makes the racing culture so much more interesting when you know people across the country that are working towards the same goals you are. I met two really great guys at last year's camp who were doing Ironman Wisconsin. Normally I wouldn't pay much attention to that race, but I tracked them online all day. When I saw them come across the finish line on the live video feed, I was the guy standing in my living room cheering at the computer screen.
An on race day, it's even better to see people out on the course. Shooting words of encouragement to someone else has a great way of making you forget your own state, if only for a moment. This camp was focused on IMCDA so all of these folks will be out there racing; it'll be a lot of fun. We had one camper headed to Ironman Lake Placid too...
Anyway, I got down to camp on Friday, May 9th. Since I was there a bit early, and was on the plane with another local camper, we got a "bonus" swim on Friday. We swam a little hard but both had cramping problems after about 3400y. It was odd that it happened to both of us at a similar time in the swim. Something to do with the travel...
The purpose of camp is to push yourself and train in a way you can't back home. Camp provides everything you need - they shuttle you around, they feed you, they set up the workouts. You just eat, sleep, and suffer. Good times. No work, no errands, no distractions.
Over the course of the week, I logged...
Total: 36:45 training time
Swim: 5h / 16000y
Bike: 25h / 469 mi
Run: 6:45h / 48.3 mi
And here's the schedule for camp:
Sat: 4 hour ride, 30 minute run
Sun: 2:30 run in Joshua Tree National Park (photo above), 2 hr easy bike later in the day
Mon: 3000y swim, 105 miles on the bike on a hot, windy day
Tues: 4300y swim, 1 hour run
Weds: 3.5 hour ride in Joshua, 50 minute run
Thurs: Swim 5000y, Ride 35 miles, run 40 minutes
Friday: Big ride around Big Bear - 107 miles, 7 hours, 12K vertical feet of climbing
Saturday: 41 mile ride up Idyllwild, a large mountain near Palm Springs, then a 90 minute run
You get the idea. The reward of all of this is the incredible food that's served each night. Meals are served at Mitch's house and are home cooked since "all you can eat" is a given. After the workouts, we'd clean up at the hotel, then get picked up for dinner, have a beer or glass of wine, then eat ourselves silly. Usually we tried to get into bed by 10 or 10:30. Rinse and repeat the next day.
What's the point of all of this, you ask? Good question. Any fitness is based on the concept of over-reaching (aka overload). You push your body a little past where it's used to going, and it causes an adaptation in response to that over-reach. That's how you get fitter. There's lots of ways to do this: through volume (longer workouts or more of them), or through intensity (working out harder). These concepts aren't completely interchangeable: you can't necessarily get the same adaptations via intensity that you get from volume. Ironman is heavily geared towards volume. But there are only so many hours in the day, so we try to find ways to over-reach within the time we have.
So camp is mostly a mondo-example of this. You pound a bunch of volume, and some intensity, into your body when you have little stress or distractions, and time to rest, recover, and refuel properly. Or that's what they tell you. I wasn't sure if this was terribly effective for me last year. It wasn't obvious to me that camp made me a lot fitter. This year seemed different.
A few anecdotal observations...
- Many of the workouts - particularly the swims - didn't crush me like they did last year. I was dreading the swims going into camp because they were so painful last year. This year was completely different. The swims were hard, but doable, and I didn't feel wrecked afterwards, even though I'm swimming quite a bit faster.
- I had kind of a low point in the middle of the week (Tues/Weds) where the fatigue was getting to me, and the constant wind on our bike rides was dragging me down. I readjusted my mind-set on Thursday and that helped a lot. I saw much better results on the bike and felt like I actually got fitter through the week.
- I ran well at camp. The guy I roomed with - a fast guy named Scott Greene - and I had very compatible running paces. Most of the runs are in the hottest part of the day after a bike ride. At the start of each run we'd say "okay, nice and easy this time" but we'd end up at more of a race cadence. We logged some good miles and I really bumped my confidence in the process. It will be fun to see him go well in June.
- The ability for your mind to dictate your physical perceptions shouldn't be underestimated. When I started getting tired later in the week, it was easy to say "wow, my legs are smoked, I can't ride hard today" and I would really feel that way. But when I decided to actually give it a go, I discovered I wasn't in as bad of shape as I thought I was. In fact, on Friday we did our "epic ride" with a climb called Waterman Canyon out of San Bernardino up to Rim of the World. This is a monster climb - about 7000 vertical feet over less than 20 miles. I made a decision to give it a good go and had one of the better climbing days I've ever had. It's in there when you need it.
Finally, it was fun to look at my training logs from the camp last year to compare against this year. I don't want to jinx myself, but I'll just say the difference was much bigger than I expected it to be. Hopefully that carries over to race day.
After camp, I had a few days were I was super-tired. I got some good sleep and now I'm back at it, with just 4 weeks until IMCDA.
Lots of camp details at Sean Hackney's blog.
