Learning from Trials: honesty and evaluation in training

Almost exactly a year out from the One Day challenge, I wanted to set myself a benchmarking exercise, something to figure out where I was on as many levels as I could.

The purpose was simple — to come up with a plan to maximise my performance this time next year, I need to know where I am right now.

I already knew there were several things I knew were gaps in my progress. I haven’t been able to train my fitness as I would like — the pandemic has kept me away from the erg, and the desire to avoid injury has stopped me pushing fitness by running.

And my mental skills are all way short of where they would have been with good training under my belt. In large part that has been the result of the pandemic’s influence on my mental health, and the need to focus on my strength and endurance.

Knowing those big gaps are there will take some hard, honest scrutiny in the coming weeks to address. But for now, I wanted to focus on the areas I have been able to work on.

First up, I wanted to see what effect it would have combining hard challenges on the same day. I had originally planned to do some heavy lifting before the 50 kilometres I had scheduled in. But the week before that was due, I put together a really concentrated test session.

It started with a card memorization — 5:27:17 is the slowest I’ve been in a long time. Not a good start. Next, after walking the 2.5k to the gym straightaway was some single rep lifting as heavy as I was happy going without a belt (so I didn’t have to worry about the logistics of storage). I squatted 70kg, benched 60 and deadlifted 80. Finally it was instantly into a 16 kilometre brisk walk at just quicker than 10 minutes per kilometre pace.

It was a very mild and mini run though but gave me a lot of information about where I was — and wasn’t.

Most significantly, lifting before using my legs like that was sufficiently hard that it’s clear a 50k after lifting wasn’t on the cards.

So decision 1 was to make the 50k a standalone test and seriously build in weights-then-endurance into the next training block. As it happened that would turn out to be a great decision, enabling me to learn a huge amount about where my endurance levels are.

There have been some really important learning points from the experience of putting everything together in a mini test.

• Humility — I’ve had it laid out on paper just how basic my current abilities are. I’m a long long way from where I would like to be.
• Honesty — the flip side of that is that I have vital information. And that information is essential if I’m going to put together a plan that takes me from where I am now to where I want to be.
• Combinations of disciplines are always harder than doing the disciplines on their own. I knew this in theory, but it was really important to experience it — it brought it home how much this whole challenge is not about maximising a single point but maximising the area under the curve. And that will mean compromising on every single individual point. And I have to learn to be OK with that psychologically.
• It confirmed that this is a challenge I really want to do. I loved being, in effect, pushed in 3 ways. I love that I’ve made progress from the place I was a year ago and I love that there is still so much scope to improve.
• It confirmed that I could actually do three things together, however mediocre the performance. A year ago I couldn’t have. That gave me confidence in the work I’ve done to build a base. And hope that in the not too distant future I can start shifting from that overall base-building approach to more specialised training.
• It marked more than a year of training without significant injury. That’s something I’ve never achieved before. And it comes from consistency and a level of self-awareness derived from experience (and my spouse’s wisdom on the subject, far greater than my own). It comes from accepting that sometimes the foot needs to come off the gas. That rest matters at my age. And that mobility and flexibility matter.
• I REALLY want to get some actual sponsors and support crew, and eventually even to work with people studying performance and in particular cross-fertilisation of performance in the 50+ population. And it has showed me just how far I need to go to make that likely.