Training With Bio-feedback For A Triathlon – Guest post by Sean Geddes

Sean Geddes, Ironman

I’ve been a competitive endurance athlete as long as I can remember. I was doing children’s events at road races by the time I was 4 and when I was seven years old I started racing in cross country running and track all around the Northwest region in the Junior Olympics.

From that young age training and racing became a part of my life and served to define me as a person. I kept up competitive running until I entered my first year of high school upon which I began rowing. I spent the following four years racing around the U.S. and in Canada, with a year round training schedule.

It was at this time that my interest in how to train began to develop as I spent substantial time outside of practice working by myself to improve my strength and conditioning.

First Triathlon

At the age of seventeen I raced my first triathlon and immediately fell in love with the sport. By my second year of college I was averaging 20-25 hours per week of endurance training in swimming, cycling, and running. It was painful and boring, yet I was seeing myself get faster, even if it was at a rate that I now consider to be painfully slow.

That same year I got into long course racing in the sport, making half iron distance races my primary focus. After a rather poor performance in 2006 at the inaugural Ironman 70.3 World Championships due to mechanical issues on the bike, I stepped up my training even more, determined to make up for it by crushing the following season.

That year, I trained 30-40 hours a week. Despite several injuries, one of which had me unable to ride or run for over a month, I got the speed and endurance I wanted. Even though I was consistently exhausted, run down, half sick, and my body had all sorts of little injuries, I was fast.

Crash

Part way through the summer, I had a crash that put my training and racing on hold. Descending on the bike during a long ride, I was cut off by a car that pulled out of a parking lot to do an illegal u-turn. I hit the side of the hood going over 30 mph. Fortunately I had no devastating injuries, just acute pre-patellar bursitis in my left knee and a lot of deep contusions.

I spent the next ten months unable to do almost any training as my knee healed up. When I returned to training it didn’t take long to find out that I couldn’t handle much of the high volume training that had been my staple. I saw myself working through consistent and recurring injuries over the next 9 months.

Finally, rather frustrated, I took a long break from any form of endurance training, focusing instead on strength. Unfortunately, some of the issues that I’d had from the endurance work continued to be exacerbated by much of what I was doing as I would focus on maximal tension. During this time, I turned to both RKC and Z Health as possible ways to deal with one of my major recurring injuries in my hip.

Neither delivered.

Never race again vs. trying bio-feedback

There were more than a few times that I came to the conclusion that I would never be able to seriously race again.

After being introduced to bio-feedback last December I started to incorporate it into all of my lifting. An endless stream of PR’s soon followed. Shortly after I made the decision to move back to my hometown of Portland, OR after living in Boston for six years.

At the same time, I desired to get back to racing. The only issue was that the last race I’d done had messed me up so badly that now I was in pain every time I ran more than one mile.

So I decided to experiment with training a different way for racing. I based it all off of bio-feedback. I began training to race again in late March, with my first race of the season scheduled for May 2nd with the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon in San Francisco.

During this time I averaged maybe one run per week, and one or two days on the bike and in the pool. Each day I trained though saw incredibly disproportionate results. In the three weeks before I raced I saw my mile splits drop by 30 to 40 seconds on hour long training runs while the ankle pain that I had been experiencing after one mile disappeared.

Race day

I went in to race day being told by a few people who had seen how little I’d trained that I wasn’t even close to being ready to race, and I’d be dying part way into it.

My swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco was phenomenally easy, even though I had come nowhere near that distance when I was training. I reached the shore in 32 minutes barely fatigued. I had major concerns about the bike going into the race. I had spent minimal amount of time descending on my bike since the crash two plus years ago, and still was very uncomfortable descending at anything approaching a decent speed.

The following hour on the hills of San Francisco proved me right. I blew past everyone around me on the climbs and flats, and then got absolutely ravaged by almost everyone on the course on the frequent descents. So although in that way I was destroyed, I got a chance to see that in terms of power output and endurance, I was probably at the best I’ve ever been. After getting off the bike, my run absolutely blew my mind.

At my best, several years ago, I might have been able to average 6:10 to 6:15 miles on the flats over this type of race course. I averaged 5:30-5:40 miles on the flats Sunday. I need to emphasize that I’d only been running once per week for approximately five weeks.

Game changing

Sunday’s race marked the first that I’ve been able to really race in years. For me, this is game changing in itself. Adding in just how fast and easily I am able to increase my speed and endurance, and I see a fundamental change in the approach to training and competition in endurance sports. I have my next race in 4 weeks, my first key half iron distance of the season in eight weeks, and I see no decrease in how quickly I keep getting faster and better.

Sean Geddes

If you’d like to read more about Sean and his training methods and philosophies, please visit him on his blog, Invictus Vires.

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Tagged as: articles, endurance training, guest posts, sean geddes, triathlon