TrainingPeaks member Gordon Byrn, triathlete and coach, on training by feel vs. by the numbers

Gordo Byrn is the Founding Coach of Endurance Corner, a Boulder-based business that focuses on triathlon coaching, endurance camps and adventure travel.  Gordo is going to be writing monthly updates for TrainingPeaks that chronicle his progress towards Half Silverman, Epic Camp New Zealand and California 70.3 triathlon.  For more info, and access to a free endurance library, please check out the Endurance Corner site.

I have done very little "proper" training in the last nine months. I've been doing what I feel like and training completely on feel. I've enjoyed the freedom of being separate from the gizmos -- however, like most athletes that train on feel, I have been completely fooling myself.

When you are operating at the limits of personal (or human) endurance, you very quickly learn not to toss in any bonus intensity. It's simply too costly in terms of your week. However, if you take an athlete that has a capacity for a chronic training load of 25 hours per week and drop that to 9-12 hours per week, well, that leaves a lot of room for hammering...

This might sound familiar: it is really weird what happens when I dial down exercise and don't "train"...

• I feel GREAT physically, I think that is the mix of sustained high intensity aerobic and strength training


• I sleep a ton -- because I am doing weekly Red Zone training and get whipped


• My consistency sucks because I get wound up and binge train with massive output days


• All of the above means that my endorphin fix is erratic -- so my brain chemistry gets screwed up and I start having symptoms of depression (inside) despite feeling great physically

My mentor, and role model, John Hellemans shared that growing old is tough but quitting is worse. I am starting to understand what he may have been trying to say.

After nine months of informal and no-holds-barred training, I was feeling an increasing urge to escape. But escape from what? I had no idea, exactly. I just wanted to get away a lot -- you can probably see that in my blogs. Things came to a head in the recovery period following my wilderness adventure. I was lying in bed mulling over giving up pretty much everything in my personal strategy.

How could I simply get out of all the obligations that I had in my life...

You should be very suspicious of yourself when you get the urge to escape an (enviable) life that took years of effort to create... I was!

Fortunately, I have been reviewing my personal plan quarterly for about a decade... so I have a track record of knowing that, when I am "on plan", I am satisfied and content. So I was able to accept my current mood but pause, for a fraction of a second, and question if this was really "me" talking in my head!

Jack Daniels says that, when racing, before we slow down we should always speed up. This is also excellent advice for life.

I made a deal with myself that I would try a little bit harder before tossing twenty years of diligent effort! But what to do?

The answer was pretty obvious... A return to first principles:

• Follow my own advice - I placed myself on the Endurance Corner Half Ironman program for Half Silverman in November


• Take responsibility for my sleep patterns - wake up before 7am every single day (even if I only slept for 90 minutes)


• Strap on all the gizmos and stop the Red Zone training (above Mod-hard)


• Remove all group training from my program -- much as I love it -- it's mainly Red Zone


• Use my personality quirk of wanting to be an exemplar by creating a public record of what I actually do

The effect was pretty dramatic. In less than 100 hours my entire mood changed. Goes to show the power of neuro-chemistry (I'd like to take credit as a master coach but I don't think that's the case). I had three nights of horrible sleep but adjusted thereafter.

And while training without all gizmos was fun, as soon as I strapped on my HRM, I realized that I had been doing about 80% of my training in my Threshold zone! Whoops... that could have explained both the lack of consistency and the screwed up moods.

Now to hold myself to what is working I am created a public page so you can track my training. It's over at TrainingPeaks. I also benchmarked my aerobic performance across all sports. You can read the specific workouts on my Profile Page as well as on my twitter page (EnduranceCorner).

Here are the summaries:

• Swim - Steady pace is 1:40 per 100 LCM with Threshold pace 5s per 100 quicker


• Bike - Steady watts are 190-210 with AeT power estimated at 200w


• Run - Steady pace is 8:15-7:45 per mile with AeT pace ~8 min per mile (5 min per K for the metrically inclined).

The values above are about where I was in December 2005 after my last (extended) break. I'm going to apply the lessons from 2005/2006 and ramp back in more gently. While it is VERY tough to cap my efforts, having to publish every workout will keep me honest. I really wanted to open-it-up on the bike yesterday but knowing that I'd have to tell you about it... well it would have been embarrassing in the first week!

I'm going to do the Endurance Corner program to the best of my ability. I'll either get ripping fast or have a VERY public failure.

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