When I began bicycle racing I thought I trained wisely with a balanced approach. Stress/Recovery. Then I got fairly good, won a couple State Championships and got selected to the Olympic Training Center Resident Athlete Program. When I went there I was astounded by the volume of training we did. It buried me. It was so hard. But I got better. Fast. Then I got selected to join an amateur team in Europe. I thought. "Yeah, I am bad as hell now- I'm totally ready." I got my ass so handed to me in Europe. The Belgians, The Russians, The Dutch, The French. They trounced me. I didn't finish any of my first 13 races. And I tried. The Euros has such a harder work ethic. There was certainly "collateral damage". Each cycling federation was larger so they could "afford" to have more athletes fall by the wayside. So they pushed these guys. Their training was amazing. Unbelievable volumes. A lot of hard riding. I became an animal. I was ungodly strong. It was unnatural. I didn't use any drugs, but I became a new rider. I wasn't even a rider before. Now I was. I was a total animal. I actually won a field sprint against Belgians and Russians. I could actually attack. It was incredible. Then I hit a concrete telephone pole at 47 m.p.h. in a race in Northern France and my cycling career was over. I went back to triathlons. Here's my point: Read this forum. Everyone asks "Is it too much to do a 1/2 Ironman 2 weeks before Ironman?" In Europe they would be asking "Is 450 miles a week on the bike enough to do Ironman? How much more do I need to do?" It's no wonder Leder broke 8 hours. They do the work and survive it.

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Tom Demerly
The Tri Shop.com

I met 4 germans at Mooo when I was registering, we started chatting and they eventually got around to saying that the reason they signed up and came to Mooooo was that they only decided earlier in the year that they wanted to go to the 25th anniversery of HA so they started training in April. They race the German Long course championships about 5 weeks before mooo, another IM, and all 4 went on to qualify, one was in the top 10, the other 2 13th and 17th I think.

We've since corresponded a lot and the Volume, not the speed, that they did is astounding.

Two of the AG'ers made comments about being competitieve in HA this year and I do not doubt that they could be. Their training is relentless.

Andrewmc,

Just wondering if those German age groupers let on to how much volume they did? And do they spend an inordinate amount of time focused on one sport or another? Im always curious to see what various people do. If youve seen the new article on xtri by Ray Britt he seemed to do very well on what some people would consider lower volume.

Thanks,

Marty

first off, i dont know the answer if the big 4 were faster. But if you read any current article by them, or paula or other famous 1980's pros they'll usually say that all of their long distances and enormous training was useless and they'll never schedule that for the athletes they train now. I think its bull---i think one of the reasons they were good was because they went right up to the line of megamileage, some may have crossed the line like Tinley, but i think many of them made it out the other side a better athlete for it. Duration is definetly a major factor in improving fitness. Mike pigg has said that he spent all month at a HR of 150. When i trained 6 hrs a week i was in worse shape than i am now training 20 hrs a week. Thats not a coincidence. The body adapts. The easiest way to get better is to do more. Its only when you get to a point like the big 4 did, when they were training 35-40 hrs a week, i dont think the body was meant to do that not at least for very long before damage begins.

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Want: 58cm Cervelo Soloist. PM me if you have one to sell

Vintage Cervelo: A Resource

In absoute terms, elite usa swimmers are faster than they were in the 70's for instance. American records fall every year even in the distance evnts, granted they don't fall as fast as in the sprint events.

In relative terms, american men at the long distances, 400 meters and up went thrugh a tough time there. And in the 800 and 1500 still are going through a rough time. The australians have the men's distance events pretty well wrapped up and are deep at those distances.

American women are doing well in the distance events.

Keep in mind also that australians are nuts for swimming, why i don't know but they are.


Right now I'm going through a distance training book. It is a compilation of distance training presentations to the american swim coaches association.

In the time fo the soviet bloc big yardage was what everyone went for. They kind of all lied to the other countries coaches abou thow much they did. Of course the east germans were also hitting the drugs pretty hard too
What I'm winding my way toward is that in those days the yardage really went through the roof. Some coaches having the swimmers go 24,000 meters in a day. Then things kind of went back to lower yardage for a while there in the mid 90s. It seems that the yardage may be sarting to creep back up again in recognition of the fac that the americans weren't doing well in the distance stuff.

Be aware that what the average age group swimmer of 15 years old goes through in a day and what we mortal athletes go through are two totally different levels. The age group kids at North Baltimore aquatics where i swim i think go an hour and a half in the mornign and two at night six days a week.

I recently read an book chapter (Dynamic Swimming) which had some interview material with George Haines, one of the greatest (if not the greatest) swimming coaches ever. He has produced literally dozens of national and olympic medal winners. He feels the move to short "quality" oriented workouts is the downfall of swimming. In reference to distance swimmers in particular, he said if you don't find them by 10 years old, you will not have time to develop them to win the olympics by the time they are 16 or so. He said he feels massive distance work is the ONLY way to develop consistent high speed. When he was coaching back in the 70's and 80's, his swimmers were doing up to 30K per day at peak (my personal peak during that same period was 25K - and when I think back to just my send-off intervals for 1000 repeats, it makes me a bit depressed now!).

And if you take Lance Armstrong as an example in cycling, that guy is doing 27,000 miles a year on the bike. That's what it takes, period.

i would say any person in any sport has to be doing 25-30 hours a week of training to be not just world class, but world-record material.

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"My strategy is to start out slow and then peter-out altogether" Walt Stack

i can add my knowledge in the area of swimming. there is the theory that the difference between the austrailians and the americans in swimming now is the result of different training styles more than any difference in volume or intensity. a coach in the area (at Cincinnati Country Day H.S.) wrote an article for a swim magazine (i can't remember which one) after he visited austrailia and spent time at some of their facilities. it seems they were teaching technique that the americans had used up through the 70s or so. after that, the americans switched things up and went with a more 'scientific' technical program that was based on physics. the problem was that the austrailian and former american style was based on biomechanics, and the two don't line up. the approach using physics deals with efficiency, when we need to be concerned with employing large muscle groups (biomechanics).

this was all in response to the americans doing less that they've done in the past respectively (losing the 4x100 free relay for the first time, ever, and losing the 1500 free), and the new $1,000,000 challenge to any american who can win the gold in a world record time in the 1500 free in the athens games.

apparently it was a very well recieved article, and the head coach for the team i coached for was a proponent of it (and apparently helped proof-read it). anyway, just thought i'd throw that out there. later,

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mckenzie

The germans spent a lot of time riding, some running and one of them swam half a dozen times last year but I think that had more to do with his background as a national swimmer and there was really no need for him to do more, i think he swam 50?

The bikes were huge low speed sessions with one 40k TT a week on Thursdays done at IM pace, Tuesdays were a longish ride and Saturdays and Sundays they put in the volume, longest ride was 270km I think.

Anyway I think they're sending it to me so if I get it I'll post it.

Swimming and running have both suffered the same fate over the last 20 years from the Days of Shorter, Malley, Hodge et al. Low volume low medal count period.

For many years, the Norwegians have been dominant in xc-skiing. Xc-skiing is the single sport that is perhaps closest to triathlon in terms of physical and physiological parameters. I recall reading something a few years ago about a study that was done on the top skiers of the time - Ulvang, Dahlie Alsgaard et al. What they found was that 1000 hrs/year( about 20 hrs/week) is roughly the make or break point for these guys. Sometime in their careers they needed to train up to that level, but then typically they needed to back off from that to a balance point to maintain their performance levels. If they went over that balance point of 700 - 1000 hrs, invariably performance started to fall off due to fatigue and/or increased down-time from injury or sickness.

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

Tom,

With respect, I think that this is two seperate issues,

Do you need to train over-the-top to reach an international level of competitivness in an endurance sport? The answer is invariably, "Yes". The type of training required to reach the international level in running, swimming, cycling, xc-skiing etc . . would blow most people, even good national level athletes away. The euros( and the Africans in running) are at a completely different level. Why? Because they train at a completely different level. By most people's standards it's hard ALL THE TIME.

However, the typical the poster on slowtwitch.com, asking about whether he/she should do a 1/2 Ironman 2 weeks out from a full IM, again with respect, is a recrecational athlete and for that guy/gal, knowing the lower volume of training that they are doing, I would say that it would not be the best idea. Would it work for them - maybe. It depends on a number of variables to numerous to get into here. The safe and conservitive answer is, "No" don't do the 1/2 IM 2 weeks out. Would Lothar Leder do this - very likly yes. However, as I have pointed out he's in a completely different league.

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

My wife was filling me in on a book she was recently reading about the early humans and their life style compared to ours. Something that was interesting was that they were big on the meat eating, and not necessarly rabits. They were talking Gazell and Deer and such large animals. The early humans did not posess tools, or weapons, they caught their animals by hand. Literally running down a deer. Not by shear speed, but by endurance, chase the animal until the other animal could no longer run. Deer can run, fast and for quite a while. It had to do with the development of upright walking and its ablity to allow the human to cover vast distance. According to this book, we were meant to run, and run, and run for extreme distances.

Just a thought, to contribute to this discussion of how much is too much. We may have adapted to run long distances efficiently, but the domestication of beasts of burden, the use of tools and weapons, and the eventual development of cars have lessesened the amount we have to run.

Ryan

Where did she read this? It strikes me as questionable. First of all with no tools what are you going to do with a dear if you did catch it? Also I have seen theories which state that early humans were scavengers, not hunters. Upright walking is a byproduct of the fact that earlier primates were arboreal, since it is in fact a rather inefficient way of moving.

from my experience with running marathons---we may have been bread to "run and run and run" But i think we were only meant to run for 20 miles straight that is. A caveman, could get in a decent hunt from a 20 mile run, IMO.

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Vintage Cervelo: A Resource

Well, I hesitated posting this because it doesn't exactly match the rest of the thread. However...

>Upright walking is a byproduct of the fact that earlier
>primates were arboreal, since it is in fact a rather inefficient
>way of moving.

Actually, no. Upright walking evolved because humans moved out of the rainforest and predominantly developed in the savannah. Being required to cover long distances in the heat, man had two evolved advantages as a predator. First, running on two legs is vastly more energy efficient than running on four legs. This is especially important in the heat, as the energy used has to be dissipated. Second, we became mostly hairless, with sweat glands covering our whole body. Again, we were better able to dissipate the heat of running.

Humans can run down almost any animal. For example, if you are hunting a horse, that horse can run a 2 minute mile. But keep running after that horse, and they will tire and drop before the human does.

I disagree with the assertion that we were catching large animals without tools. The evidence is clear that we started as scavengers and evolved into hunters. But tool usage started a long time ago.

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~~Bob

The book was Up "from dragons : the evolution of human intelligence" written by John R. Skoyles Dorion Sagan (Child of Carl Sagan). I will correct myself though, I had mis remembered some of what she had told me. The theory was that early man did have primitive tools, spears and such, not boww and arorws to shoot deer from a distance.

I will however, stop here as having not read the book, I will not try to dig a hole any deeper than I already have.

Ryan

run down a horse (!!!!) ? hmmmm, this could have revolutioned every weaern movie ever made, had it been common knowledge in an eveidently less enlightened age, i must say. imagine "rounding up a possee" to go catc the dreaded black bart and his gang, or butch and sundance heading for the hole in the wall - simply by . . . . .JOGGING AFTER THEM !! whodathunkit ??? the things a fellow learns on s-twitch, i swear. :)

oops, "...revolutionized every western..." :)

Bob wrote: "First, running on two legs is vastly more energy efficient than running on four legs. "

Quite true. An extensive article in Scientific American last fall provided a compelling case for the energy efficiency of two-legged locomotion. Much more efficient use of calories than four-legged. Man is now considered the single most energy efficient land traveller in the animal kingdom.

The idea of "running down" a horse, deer or gazelle, however, is simply nonsense. For example, a pronghorn antelope (north america) can run nearly 60 miles an hour for an hour. That is 50+ miles of distance on you when you've gone at most 10 miles. Not only will you not catch it, you won't even know where it went over the horizon.

I've been around a lot of horses in my day. Believe me -- you will NOT catch one if he doesn't want to be caught. I don't care how long you go after him or how in-shape you are. You will NEVER EVER catch a horse on your own, and on foot, that doesn't like you.

I tend to agree with you on training volume, but you make some very general comments on swimming.

<Low volume low medal count period. >

This might apply to running, but I just don't see it in swimming. Perhaps you can elaborate on some USA Swimming medal counts that prove this?

I did this once before and would go through the medal counts and a demographic comparison of the US vis a vis the rest of the world but a little research and someone has saved me the trouble.

Bearing in mind that your country has 270 million people and the population of Oz is about 19 million people and the population of Europe is roughly 377 million but you eliminate all the non threats and you come up with the populations of the UK, Germany, Italy, Holland, dont think that France or Portugal are going to be threats in the pool in 04 so the population that you drawing upon to see if there is an improvement is roughly 250 million

Here are the results for you, courtesy of someone else but none the less he's on the right track............the long and the short of it is that while in absolute terms the medal count may or may not be decreasing it inevitably will and probably sooner rather than later. All thats happening is the same thing that happened in running, swimmers are hanging on by a thread but eventually you wont have a swimming equivalent of shorter, malley, hodge etc to draw upon and then all the wailing and gnashing of teeth will begin.

Anyway here are the stats, they're either right or wrong and there either is or is not a pattern, I'm going to go with there is because I did the same thing for the development of the WR's and where they have gone over the last 5 Oly's and I think off the top of my head that while the US still held as many today a lot of them were really old and had not been set recently while the Australian ones were all relatively recent.......

http://www.usswim.org/..._statisticallook.pdf

when you get to any pool in France you know why France won't be a threat...no lanes...just playing...

There is one breastroker that is decent over 200m and could get a medal (Perrot I think), there is one guy pretty good over 400-1500m however with the Aussies over that distance, there is simply no chance.
Roxanna Maracineanu may get a medal over 200m back, and Frank Esposito should definitely get one over 200m fly (after breaking the WR for the distance last month SCM and having the 2nd Best time LCM behind Phelps.) considering how tough it is to swim in France, I am amazed there are still swimmer around

For anyone interested in evolution and endurance I suggest you read Survival of the Fittest by Mike Stroud. Heres the Amazon link and description. Very interesting and has a slightly different take on why we're on 2 legs.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/.../026-0375657-4093221

On the hunting subject, people are forgetting that man caught these faster animals by using his intelligence and hunting in a group.

The man versus horse races are a useful comparison despite the fact that a horse is burdened by a rider. Shorter distances are always won by the horse and rider. However, over an 80km course recently man did win by a few seconds!

http://www.gulf-news.com/ need to search for "man versus horse".

Wanted to point out another obvious book on the topic:

(first came out as Racing the Antelope) current edition:

Why We Run by Bernd Heinrich.

For those of you who have not read it: Heinrich is a natural history writer, has some great books out there if you are interested in the subject. THis book is structured around his attempt at becoming US champion in the 100-K. He suscribes to the evolutionary theory of 'man as runner' --that humans evolved in part as hunters of big game, which they would slowly chase on foot, until the animals tired out. Goes into interesting nutrition experiments on himself (think quarts of olive oil instead of 'gatorade'). There's a bit about physiology of running, some of it comparative (ie, different systems btw how camels and humans respond to dehydration, why the pronghorn antelope runs as fast as it does, how it is physiologicaly possible for a human to chase down a deer etc). I think the SciAmerican article last fall may have been a chapter out of this book, but Id have to check on that. He's got a great philosophy of running, in addition to his evolutionary theory of running.

Definitively recommend.

I didn't ask about demographics or world records, you stated in general regard to swimming:

<"Low volume low medal count period">

Well, according to the link you've provided, and to my own sources, the United States men have consistently dominated the international swimming scene if you go by medal counts as a measure of dominance.

The last two olympics every one has jumped on the "men's USA elite swimming is going to be embarrassed this year" bandwagon. It hasn't happened yet, and it won't happen in the foreseeable future.