The limitation behind a treadmill is that you are really just trying to keep up instead of propelling  your body mass forward.  You do work very similar muscles, but it is harder to gain real-world speed. A treadmill is excellent for helping you work on quick leg turnover, and it can be a great tool when you are lacking motivation to push the pace outside, but if you really want to be able to maintain that leg speed during a race you need some outside time on a 400m track, long dirt trails, or smooth open road with no distractions. That said, getting inside for some speed workouts can limit risk of injury.  In general, most treadmills offer more shock absorption than the open road (though we’ve been on a couple that feel worse) and you can easily fine tune your pace.

One thing, however, is that it almost always seems easier to hold that given pace OUTSIDE, than it does on the treadmill.  You would think the opposite would be true, but we’ve always found that we have to work a lot harder to hit the machine’s pace readout, than to hold that same pace on the track.  Again, we would bet that comes down your body mass being in motion, helping you maintain some speed.

Our favorite treadmill workout is to mix up pace and incline every 5′.

On a 60′ run, something like this:

10′ warm up low HR
5 x 5′ building in speed every 5 minutes (where last 5 or 10′ is faster than goal race pace)
Lower speed to mid range pace or even slower
5 x 3′ building in incline where HR begins to go anaerobic on the final couple intervals (helps to simulate more real world effort)
Straight into fastest pace possible for 2′ on a flat.
Cool down ~8′

Mix it up and play with the intervals.

#1: Make sure you’re a member of the Ironmantriathlontips email list.

#2: Leave your favorite swim workout in the comments section of this post (use your real email so we can contact the winner).

From there we’ll do a random draw on March 31st 2010.

Important Criteria!!!!: The swim workout does have to be a legitimate swim workout – “400 meters IM” does not count.  Break it up into your Warm ups, Main sets, and Cool downs.  If you’d like to leave multiple swim workouts, please do so in separate comments so your name will be entered into the draw more than once.

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We are going to restrict the draw to residents of North-America for ease of shipping.  The winner is also responsible for the shipping cost and any duties that may arise from shipping across a border.  Product will be shipped from the Ironmantriathlontips ‘headquarters’ – currently in California.

About Ultragen:

Research has shown there’s a critical thirty-minute glycogen window (called the “window of opportunity”) immediately following exercise when insulin sensitivity is at its highest and exhausted muscles essentially open the door to nutrients. If nutrients are not absorbed quickly enough, however, this opportunity for maximum restoration is lost. But it’s not just when nutrients are absorbed, it’s also about which nutrients are available. The body requires more than just sugar and protein to fully recover, so recovery is limited without a precise balance of nutrients. Ultragen delivers 60g of glucose, because clinical studies show that high glycemic carbohydrates taken after exercise create a catalyst, which increases the uptake of essential nutrients into exhausted muscle. In addition, Ultragen offers a synergistic blend of vitamins, minerals, co-factors, glutamine and BCAA’s specifically designed to modulate the damaging effects of cortisol brought on by intense endurance training. The Ultragen formula is designed to be fully absorbed within the essential thirty minute glocygen window, when the body is primed to absorb nutrients.

Ultragen contains special proteins (Whey Protein Isolate and Hydrolyzed Whey Protein) that meet the unique requirements of endurance athletes. Fast acting Whey Protein Isolate delivers high levels of anti-catabolic branch chain amino acids. Hydrolyzed Protein is enzymatically predigested in small, easy to digest, di- and tri-peptide chains that are quickly absorbed for muscular recovery. This is important because small molecule proteins are superior to the larger, hard to digest Whey Protein Concentrates that are used in most recovery products. The special proteins in Ultragen are absorbed faster and easier assuring you maximize recovery during the critical thirty-minute glycogen “window of opportunity”. The result: quicker recovery, improved endurance and the ability to race at a higher level.

Ultragen is designed to be absorbed quickly. For maximum recovery, mix Ultragen with water and consume immediately after exercise. Mixing Ultragen with anything besides water and/or consuming other foods during the first thirty minutes after exercise will slow down absorption. Thirty minutes after using Ultragen you should drink and/or eat something else.

Eating high quality food on rest days (lots of fruits and vegetables) will help ensure that your rest day is actually doing what it’s supposed to – repairing muscle and cell damage caused by hard training.

This is especially true after hard races. The craving for junky food is always at its highest after a race, it feels like a reward for accomplishing the task at hand. Yes you crave salt, but try getting it with a V8 instead of potato chips and fries. If you’re diligent about your food intake you can turn those race days in to your best ever training sessions. Good food first, party food later!

At the risk of having this sound like a blatant plug: We will say that one of the more impressive recovery products we’ve come across is Ultragen by First Endurance. Not only does it hit the bloodstream quickly and contain all the proteins, vitamins, and minerals you’d want from a recovery drink – the stuff mixes with water to the texture of a juice.  Absolutely no clumping or powdery residue. It is a pretty nice option for bringing with you post workout or post race; you can mix it on the fly and the flavour is awesome.

We find that if we end the day with a “flop” – the above described pool time -  instead of  a long/hard bike, or especially a run, we sleep better and feel more energized and ready to go the next day. Raising your HR by doing a few short, harder efforts (some 25’s fly, 25 sprints etc. ) can help flush metabolic waste products from your system and speed recovery as well.  If you’re short on time, try scheduling the occasional swim workout (a real training session, not just the ‘flop’) as your last workout. It will still help leg recovery from riding and running.

This post is not about all the factors that affect your race nutrition, just the nutrition itself.  Specifically, the concentration and dilution of your carbohydrate intake.  Okay, we’ll mention a couple issues first.  Adequate training being the number one concern – if you haven’t done the work you will fall apart before the finish line, regardless of what you eat.  Issue number 2: Pacing.  Simply put, know your limits.  50% of the ‘nutrition’ issues in a race are actually pacing issues.  You’ve gone too hard on the bike in order to keep up with stronger cyclists, then blow up half way through the run.  There’s a reason why more men fall apart at the end of race than do women…and it’s not because woman are tougher, it’s because most are better at controlling their ego on the bike.

With respect to ACTUAL nutrition issues, here’s what we’ve found after talking to many ‘people in the know’.  First off, be wary of anything containing complex Fat or Protein (as opposed to nice, easy to digest, amino acids and cabohydrates) making their way into your stomach during the race.  Calories from those sources are very hard to breakdown efficiently and can cause some intestinal shut down once the intensity (on the run) picks up.  If your race intensity is low enough, you can most likely digest fat/protein properly without adverse affects to your performance.  So, if you plan on walking the entire marathon or half marathon, go for it! The other item  to consider (as if there were only two!) is how you dilute the carbohydrates you take in.  Most drink mixes out there give you a suggested serving like 1 scoop per 12 Oz.  TURNS OUT, there’s a reason for that!!! Wow.  On our First Endurance EFS drink for example, they say exactly that (1 scoop per 12 Oz), and because they’ve done their research they know that this the optimal dilution for our bodies to process those carbohydrates without leaching water from our cells – therefore keeping you hydrated and fueled properly over an endurance event.


If we look at that EFS drink label a bit further: 1 scoop has 24 grams of carbohydrate.  Convert the Oz. to ml (not sure why the United States must use both the metric and imperial system on their labels, seems kinda ridiculous) which gives you 355 ml.

Don’t lose focus yet, it’s worth knowing this stuff, trust us.

24 grams of carbohydrate divided by 355 ml gives you just under 7% solution.  That’s an optimal dilution for keeping yourself fueled without compromising hydration.  (Hydration is another post altogether. Here we’re dealing with carbohydrate dilution – how to best absorb your calories).  Another piece of the puzzle is that the human body can actually only absorb about 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour, but you can bump that number up close to 80-90 grams of carbohydrate per hour if you use a product with multiple types of carbohydrate (sugars – sucrose, dextrose) which have different receptors in your cells.

One more multiplication to keep in mind – carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram (fat has 9, protein has 4), so your upper hourly limit to carbohydrate intake, assuming optimum absorption, is ~360 calories (4 x 90).  If you take in that many calories, you need to take in about 1.25 liters of water in order to achieve that happy number for your stomach ~7% dilution.  7% isn’t a hard fast rule, but a good approximate.  If you are good at drinking water during races, you could lean towards 8% and assume that the water will dilute the carbohydrates you consume.  For a shorter,  higher intensity race you could even go closer to 9 or 10%.

So, what if you need more than ~360 calories per hour?  You can certainly take in more than 90 g of CHO per hour, but they’ll sit around waiting to be digested.  In the last hour of the bike, leaning towards an extra 25 grams of CHO may be fine, because you’ll almost certainly be consuming far less during the run.  You could also throw in small amounts of fat/protein from a bar (quarter bar per hour, as an example).  Another 50 calories per hour (5.5 grams of fat) is most likely not going to cause any stomach issues unless you’re redlining your heart rate for too long.  Play around in training, but really think about it. Look at labels and do some math, don’t just wing it and threaten your race, like we did in the past!

If you live in a cold climate and spend a lot of time indoors on the trainer it is generally easier to keep yourself in check. A note – your HR is likely lower on the trainer than the equivalent perceived effort out side so don’t stress if you can’t get it into your usual outdoor zone. The workout is definitely still worth it.

You see some athletes training really hard in January, but hopefully these are the ones that have years and years of solid aerobic base in their systems – not the typical age group athlete that has taken a few months easy/off and needs to gradually build fitness.

Taking the time to train in aerobic zones will help you avoid burn out and extend your season – hopefully all the way to Kona in October.

The end of your off-season or after a rest week, while healthy (no colds or injuries kicking around) is the best time to establish some starting numbers. From there, you can monitor any irregularities and hopefully avoid the pitfalls of over-training or fighting through a training session when your body is trying to fight off a cold.


Typically, an increase of 10% or more from your base value would be a sign that something is not right.  For example, if you regularly see a morning heart rate of 45, but you wake up one day with a HR of 50 or more you’ll want to be careful about how you approach your upcoming training day.  If you know it’s not stemming from poor recovery from the previous training day or a horrible nights sleep, then perhaps you’ll want to watch for signs of sickness.  Quite often when your body is trying to recover from hard training sessions you’ll open yourself up to a depressed immune system – your resting heart can be the first indicator something is not right.

An added benefit  of monitoring your resting HR is that you may also be able to track some improvement in fitness.  However, this doesn’t always work as it should!  If a fit person jumps into a period of inactivity they can actually see a decrease in resting HR simply because their hematocrit (ratio of red blood cells to overall blood volume) levels will rise, thus carrying more oxygen to the muscles.  But, as a whole, any decrease in your normal resting HR can be interpreted as a good thing – so long as you don’t go down to the 20 BPM range – then it is time to make a trip to the doctor! I’ve heard of low 30’s and even a couple 29 beat per minute hearts, but those are rare and often attributed to abnormally large hearts.

If you’re diligent about keeping track of your workouts you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how this simple tool not only helps keep your motivation high (by allowing you to set weekly goals, and trying to out-do last month), but it will also allow you to train more effectively in future months and years.  The magic really starts to happen once you’ve got a full year’s worth of data.

It’s more than likely that you have a vague recollection of what you did last January, but imagine if you knew exactly what you did – it would be so simple to improve on that program and make the upcoming year even more succesful.  This works on a month-to-month basis as well.  Keeping track of progressing run volume is one of the best ways to avoid getting injured while pushing yourself to make gains.  “Ok, you ran 200km in January, can you get to 220km in February?”

If you’re a social person, most of the online training logs also allow you to share your workouts with the training community.  Some like this option, some don’t…you can always turn the privacy settings on.

So get logging!!

This tip has to do with your shammy - relative to your saddle height on race day (not the amount of time you spend sitting around in it).  Most of us as triathletes will race in a tri-short with a small shammy that doesn’t soak up a gallon of water from the swim, and doesn’t feel like a diaper during the run.  However, we often train in a normal cycling shorts with those nice thick pads that ease the bumps and bruises on our skinny butts.  The difference between the two is relatively minor, but, it does make a difference on race day if your legs and back are used to having that extra ~5mm of height.

So how do you solve this?  We tend not to like adjusting our physical saddle height to compensate, but, if you want to be extreme you could certainly do this.  Rather, we simply make sure to train in our Tri-shorts a couple times per week, and every single ride for the 2-3 weeks before race day.  The difference really is small, but, with ~5000 revolutions of the pedals every hour on the bike, those little differences are worth paying attention to.

For those long rides dedicated to being in the race position we generally find the Tri-shorts more comfortable anyway.  Perhaps you’ll find the same!