3-3-3: June Racing and the Next Step in Generalist Training (June 2024)

 

Boston 10K medal, B2VT finisher glass, Boston Dragon Boat 2nd place C Division medal

Boston Dragon Boat Festival
Date: June 8-9, 2024
Location: Boston / Cambridge, MA
Distance: 2 x 200m Sat; 3 x 500m Sun

B2VT
Date: June 15, 2024
Location: Massachusetts, NH & VT
Distance: 142 miles
Goal Time: 12:00:00
Actual Time:  12:27:20

Boston 10K
Date: June 23, 2024
Location: Boston / Cambridge, MA
Distance: 6.2 Miles
Goal Time: 52:42
Actual Time: 54:25

“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars”

~ Proverbs 9:1

I made the right onto Exeter and then left onto Boylston.  The rain; the heat; the humidity; the lack of running for a week – had clearly taken a toll.  But, I was still within an acceptable pace.  We crossed the Marathon finish line and had a little more than 1 km to go.  The calculations in my head said I would have to average a 7:15 mile for my last kilometer.  (SPOILER ALERT: That wasn’t going to happen).  I sped up a bit over the final stretch but definitely didn’t put myself fulling into the red zone.  Across the finish line, I got my medal from McKenzie and headed to the DM tent for a ceremonial 9:15am Sam Adams.

Living Root getting our awards

The Boston 10k finished up my 3 races in 3 sports in 3 weekends.  I reached my B goal in each of the 3 events: Boston Dragon Boat Festival, B2VT and Boston 10K.  This success was because of generally consistent generalist training over the past 6 months.  Between running, lifting, cycling and paddling, I did the bare minimum to achieve my non-spectacular B Goals.

Where do I go from here? 

I have about 12 weeks until my next big block of events in September 4 events in 3 Weeks:

9/8 - Bike Not Bombs 105 miler, JP

9/14 – Spartan Beast Race, Killington

9/21 – Lake Winni Dragon Boat Race, Alton Bay, NH

9/22 – Lone Gull 10K, Gloucester, MA

Vermont along the B2VT route

With this in mind, I plan to build a training structure around two main goals

Training for life

Some specificity for events I am registered for.  (I need to be able to run 13 trail miles with obstacles, bike 105 and paddle 4 races in a day over 3 weeks – plus Lone Gull.)

Rough Draft of 7 Pillars of Generalist Training

I need to start somewhere.  I will start with a draft using guidelines of health from DHHS while adding two more – accountability and recovery – that are required to achieve the other 5

Accountability – I need to be accountable to myself, my wife and my teammates

Strength – Commit to continued strength training

Cardiovascular Endurance – Continue and increase my running / cycling

Muscular Endurance – add more endurance strength to my workouts

Flexibility – Mobility and malleability are often limited when strength and running are practices.  Need to add to this

Body Composition – cutting fat and gaining muscle.  Exercise is one step of this; calories and quality thereof is another step.

Recovery – sleep better and more. Also commit to hobbies that can help relaxation.

I know many people will find the idea of slowly building a program as the lazy way out.  And maybe that’s true.  Maybe I’m just lying to myself.  Or maybe trying to create a strong foundation, I can do this I like for longer.  We’ll find out which one it is.

And the Celtics had their parade - Tingus Pingus

 

New York Double Enduro: Brooklyn Half Marathon & Gran Fondo New York (5/18 – 5/19/2024)

 

Double Medal Monday - 
Enjoying a Stone IPA on the train with medals form Brooklyn and Ft Lee

Brooklyn Half Marathon
Date: May 18, 2024
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Distance: 13.1 Miles
Goal Time: 2:00:00
Actual Time:  1:58:04

Gran Fondo New York
Date: May 19, 2024
Location: New York and New Jersey
Distance: 85 Miles
Goal Time: 6:30:00
Actual Time:  6:45:52

I looked up at the last stretch.  85 miles in and there was one last climb.  A sign at the bottom said: “100 M to finish.”  While it was probably only about 5-7% up the final climb, with 98 miles in my legs over the previous two days, it felt like 20%.  Two things came to mind.  First, I will never complain about a pro unable to sprint away with this much left on a mountain stage again.  But second, I had completed an endurance challenge that I could be proud of: Brooklyn Half on Saturday: Gran Fondo New York on Sunday.  (And thirdly, why is this hill here at the end?) 

On the second one, it was a victory of perspective and perseverance rather than preparation and pedagogy.  While there was surely a path to properly train for both events, I both did not and did not want to.  I have found a current path to half ass train for both to be the best plan for me now. This path walks away from both the specificity of running or triathlon training, or the multi-stimulus conjugate system of Westside and even the challenges of Crossfit.  It is something different and something I want to explore. 

In the 1980s Joseph Campbell – author of The Hero with A Thousand Faces and creator of the monomyth hypothesis – sat down with Bill Moyers for a series of interviews called The Power of Myth.  During the interviews he refers to himself as a popularizer and a generalist.  He isn’t the traditional folklorist with roots in literary criticism or a psychologist coming from longitudinal research.  Instead, Campbell was trying to connect the strands of human experience through a general understanding of multiple disciplines at once.

My training leading to this has failed because I was trying to get too deep into training of too many things.  I kept looking at this as my path back to whomever I was as an athlete before Covid and before my little minor injuries that kept me from running well at Chicago, New York and Malta.  This has been show by the number of blog posts since 2022 – zero. 

I should have looked at my training as what it was – generalist.

Going forward – for the unforeseeable future – I will be adhering to a generalist endurance training.  While not specializing in one sport or training modality, I will attempt to fit what I need.  Why does that look like long term?  I don’t know.  Is that a plan that can build to another thing in the future? I don’t know.

Generalist training is going to be general and non-specific long term.  There will be no macrocycles; no mesocycles.  Maybe a few microcycles?  I don’t know. 

I know many people in the fitness world will reject this. Many old school strength coaches see RPE training as a copout.  Many specific endurance athletes see easy runs or easy bikes as an excuse to not try hard.  And I'm sure some people I know will just laugh at me and under my breath tell me it's just an excuse to train lazy.  

My next two events are: Boston Dragon Boat Festival and B2VT over the next 3 weeks.  So my generalist training will be specific to dragon boat and cycling for the next 3 weeks.  I guess that’s a microcycle. Overall effort will be the goals for the next while. Welcome to the Generalist Endurance Athlete.