Editor's Note: When the snow starts to fall a number of professional triathlete flee the cold of Boulder, Colorado for warmer training grounds. Marky V (check out his web site HERE) is one of the lucky pros who is training on the big island of Hawaii this month. There are three informal training camps going on right now in Hawaii.
To give you a feel for what's it is like to train in Hawaii Marky V filed this first report. He'll be reporting for us from time to time to bring a bit of the Hawaiian to you.
Greetings and Aloha,
As the 2009 season begins I kick it off in none other then the place where it will end, the ocean and lava fields of Kona. Not to mention the heat and humidity too. It might be January but it's still Kona.
There's more to riding here than just the Queen K. Going up!? High road.
Throughout the year I will be checking in with everymantri.com and giving some first person accounts of the life of a professional athlete as well as what it is like to make a living within the multisports industry (coaching/racing/marketing/etc). Much more to come on that but for now a view into what I've been up to and how camp is going.
Kona Community Aquatics Center… two best things about it… outdoors and FREE!!!
December can be a crazy month for everyone. The social, work, family and training demands/requirements add up in ways that no other month can compare to. My time with the family was great and I enjoyed being up in the mountains doing some back country hiking <attached pic CIMG6002>. Needless to say the training time drops and any hopes of increasing fitness goes out the window. I came to accept this and moved on, knowing full well that once January hit that it was to be "GAME ON". Game on ran into a little bit of a hitch with the annually required cold surfacing on New Years Day, but since I arrived in Kona things have been rolling along quite nicely.
The basic objective of an early season camp, and I will write about in-season camps as soon as I have attend one, is to snap you back into the consistency of training. I am not doing anything all that crazy, but rather simply building the training load back up. The benefit of any camp situation is that in being removed from the 'home' situation it allows for strict adherence to the training. An example of a typical day would consist of something like…
AM: 50 min run Zn2 w/6-8 200m strides
Mid-day: 2.5 hour ride Zn2 with either 4x6 minutes climbing Zn4 on 1min rest or 15x1min Zn5 on 1min rest
PM: 4000y swim: I usually get about 1000 WU in 1500-2000 mainset and 1000 worth of pulling in.
Wash - Rinse - Repeat
Note: Zones on the run are PE based and zones on the bike are wattage based.
It's really nothing all that interesting, but linking up 3 weeks of that pulls the body out of the off season and primes it for the more interesting work to come that gets you ready for the racing season.
In my next post I'll take a step back and cover who I am and how I got here. For now though… enjoy the pics and the view from my office to the left!
Mahalo!
When the day is done I like to go for a sunset walk and soak up the day