Ben Collins

Tuesday I had this bright idea that after a long hard workout I would go hang out with a friend in a boat on Lake Washington. There’s not a lot of activity involved in this, but I did have to go to the gas station, help carry gas tanks, help prep the boat, dive in the lake, sit in a hot tub… you get the point. It was fun. Victor, meanwhile, had done similar training in the morning, but had spent his day relaxing, self-massaging, eating, drinking water… you get the idea.

When I got home he asked me how I felt, and I answered honestly, “great.” The next morning however, I was dragging my butt. Everything was supposed to be easy, but even the easy swim hurt. Swimming doesn’t hurt me! I’m not supposed to hurt on an easy swim! We finished out workouts and Victor asked how I felt. I answered honestly, “horrible.”

That was my first “learn from experience” lesson from my new coach. The lesson is": when you’re just getting used to a new training program, get as much recovery as you can.” and more importantly, “recovery is recovery.” Which is a little different than my previous philosophy, “if it doesn’t hurt, it must be recovery.”

Wednesday I took a slightly different tactic. After telling Victor how I felt I did my normal eating stretching and DVD watching routine, and kept my feet up, and ate more food, and took a nap. This morning I felt awesome. I got up on the first beep of my alarm, I had one of the best swim workouts of the season, and I was smiling through it all. I even got to beat up Victor on the bike, which was great fun.

Tomorrow I’ll feel great because I recovered today. I learned my lesson.

I’m currently watching the Democratic National Convention. C-Span is way more tolerable than the other channels because there is no commentator. I don’t understand why they pay people to talk about nothing during the breaks. They’re just talking heads. I’d rather watch Superbowl commercials.

In January Victor Plata (far right back row) invited me to race in Brazil with him and Matt Chrabot. I didn’t really know either of them, but over the course of five days in South America we were able to get to know each other pretty well. Victor has been racing ITU for 10 years, and had a wealth of knowledge and stories. Speaking to him was like flipping through an encyclopedia of triathlon. When I came home we stayed in touch, on-and-off. So in June when Victor graduated from Law School and told me he was going to start coaching – it got me thinking. I get along very well with Dr. Mike, and I was very successful under his instructions, but I am also eager to learn from someone who has actually done the races I’m going to, and who has succeeded at the level I want to be at. It was a sad farewell, but I’m excited for Victor to take over as the new CEO of bc.org. (which is my dorky way of saying he’s my new coach)

I started working with Coach Plata this week. He arrived in Seattle Wednesday night to show me in person how to train under him. This week was equal to my highest mileage week for running ever, and my highest volume week in the pool since I was in college. I’m totally wiped. I feel good, and I’m sleeping gloriously, but I also have no desire to up my social schedule. Actually, I haven’t even seen my friends in Seattle yet, and I was gone for most of the past three months.

Ugh I have to get work done, but I’m tired.

Saturday was the USA Triathlon National Junior Championships, held here in Colorado Springs.

This is Peter Mallett and me working hard out on the course. I don’t want to say the event wouldn’t have happened without us, but it certainly wouldn’t have been us much fun.

This is the Junior Girls (women?) rounding the final swim buoy. The leader was Lauren Goldstein-Kral by about 30 seconds. She’s been in this camp at the Olympic Training Center with me, and I expected this type of performance after seeing her swim a 19:30 1500m time trial one morning. She had only been at altitude for a week.

This is Lauren starting the run with a 50 second lead over the next person.

This is Kate Ross, 50 seconds behind Lauren. She’s also part of the Elite Development Camp here in Colorado Springs. She had a group on the bike, and they still lost 20 seconds to Lauren’s awesome TT abilities.

Kate, however, can run like a cheetah. She took down Lauren in the first 5k and extended her lead by (as my roommate Kevin Collington says), “a shit ton.” (He also asked me to add in that a “shit ton” is the time equivalent to a ton of bovine manure, or about a minute and fifty seconds.)

Here’s Kevin Collington helping to clean up some broken glass in the hallway after an unnamed triathlete knocked a picture off the wall. I don’t want to say the picture wouldn’t have fallen without kevin, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun.

That’s it for now.

Really really good. The Olympic Training center has a cafeteria that serves a huge selection of healthy foods. It’s open from 7am until 9pm, so pretty much any time I want to eat. I’ve actually decided the only way to do justice to the oasis of culinary goodness that is the training center’s Caf’ is to describe it though a story.

The night I arrived at the OTC I was pretty hungry. I had been traveling for ten hours on nothing but diet sprite and a chef salad. It was 11pm, and the cafeteria was closed. At night there are ample supplies of cereal, instant oat meal and fruit, so I grabbed a bowl of raisin bran before heading to my room. By the time morning came around I was ravenous. I headed to the Caf’ and grabbed a tray. I started at the entry end of the lineup and grabbed yogurt and fruit, passed the bagels and bread (they have all sorts of stuff to put on it) then poured a small bowl of oatmeal (they always have two kinds of hot cereal, usually steel cut oats and either grits or cream of wheat). Next I grabbed some pancakes with blueberry syrup, plus a couple slices of bacon. My plate was piled up pretty high by the time my eyes fell on the omelette station. I needed to clear space, and quick, so I sat down near a big screen TV and watched the Tour De France coverage.

The omelette station is awesome. Flower is the woman who works there most mornings, and she learned my name after one visit. Now I walk into the Caf’ and she says, “hi Ben, how are you feeling?” (To which I have yet to respond with anything but, “tired”.)

Also on the breakfast menu is a cereal bar (including All-Bran, a few of the Kashi brand cereals, and Low-Fat Granola, which are some of my favorites).

And all that is just the first meal of the day.

Lunch is usually the best meal served. There’s almost always a theme – either Asian or Mexican – plus some standard American and European grub, and the food is always very different. I’ve had chicken Caesar wraps, sushi, tacos, enchiladas, roast pork, bbq ribs, hamburgers, steak, all kinds of grains, fresh veggies, grilled veggies, steamed veggies, and so on.

Dinner is like lunch, but from my experience not quite as good. Always different though.

The two highlights of the Caf’, however, are the grill (slash omelette bar), and the dessert bar. The grill always has grilled cheese, hamburgers (or veggie or turkey or chicken), sweet potato fries (so good), plus a daily special like steak sub sandwich or beef wraps, or stir fry.

The dessert bar is killer. everything baked here is awesome, from the breakfast muffins to the chocolate cake and pie. There’s also low-fat soft serve, yogurt, sorbet and ice cream. I try to limit my dessert intake, but sometimes it’s hard to do. Tonight, for instance, there was coffee cake with blueberries that went really well with my glass of milk, and last night the low-fat chocolate cake and caramel swirl ice cream was begging to be tried.

The last thing I’ll mention is the nutrition labels. They have them on everything in the Caf’. You can make count calories if you want, or make decisions between the beef burger and the turkey burger (the beef is actually lower in fat). Also, when you grab dessert, you know just what the damage is. They even have a sign next to the ice cream that says, “Every athlete has a dream, every choice makes a difference.”

Normally my parents will call me when I’m away from home and tell me about all the wonderful food they’ve had at home. It’s their way of making me a little anxious to come home (and sometimes it works), but on this trip, I could care less. My dad starts describing some salmon dish with veggies, or my mom talks about cookies she bakes and my mind starts wondering. I just don’t care. Food is completely taken care of here. I don’t have to give it a second thought.

(I would totally take pictures of my food and post it if I had a cable for my camera. But I don’t. The picture of the eating area above is all I could find online)

I’ve been in oxygen debt the past two weeks. Today is my 13th day in Colorado Springs, and I really do feel almost normal. The past 12 days, however, have been a bit of a blur. In order to put in the intensity that this camp requires and adapt to the climate I’ve pretty much done nothing besides train eat and sleep. I am a firm believer that it’s the really abnormal things that make the best stories, and so far my time in Colorado Springs blurs together in one swimming biking running eating sleeping experience. What does make a good story, however, is a description of the resident athlete lifestyle, which is pretty abnormal. For those of us staying here it may be a blur, but this is nothing like the rest of the world.

The pool is what I remember most from my visit to the Olympic Training Center as a teenager. It’s an indoor 50m x 25m pool. There are ten lanes, and each has a digital clock of its own (I’ve never actually seen it set up for short course like it is in the picture here). When teams practice here they can program the workouts into a computer and each lane will have a clock set to its individual sendoffs. So say the set is 10×500m and three lanes are on six minutes and three lanes are on seven minutes. The clocks will put up a 10 and then count down from 6 minutes or 7 minutes, and then count down until you have none left. It really takes a lot of mental effort away from the workout, but since swimming is pretty repetitive anyway, this may not be a good thing.

When we’re at the pool we share it with the junior national synchronized swimming team. They play music on the underwater speakers and have their coach saying 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1, 2, 3… and so on for pretty much the entire time we’re in the water. I try to ignore it and get my own song stuck in my head (they play the same one over and over and over…), and it is less obnoxious than you would think. What was obnoxious, however, was walking to my room last night and hearing the synchro girls gathered in a room together listening to the same song and all counting together: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1, 2…” I had a strong urge to burst into the room and yell, “NINE!”

The pool also has some great filming equipment, which we’ve barely used. I am working hard to improve my stroke efficiency, and we’ve done a little video work with it which helped. I’m hoping to get a few more pointers before I leave.

I was rooming with Greg Billington and John Dahlz, but was moved upstairs into another room with Kevin Collington and Jeremy Gimlour. Kevin was the 2007 Colligiate National Champion, while Jeremy is from the UK and has yet to switch from the British Federation. He’s hoping to get into college in the US, and his top choice is…

…(wait for it)…. 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY!!!! GO LIONS!!! GO BLUE!!!!

I love my alma mater.

Jeremy left yesterday, and was replaced today by Peter Mallet, who races for Riptide Multisport in Denver. I haven’t gotten to know Peter yet because we’ve both spent the day napping and training separately.

I wish I had some dirt on these guys that I could write about, but pretty much everyone here is awesome. We eat tons of food, we watch movies at night, we take power naps when we get a chance, we all have fancy bikes (my Beyond Fabrications is definitely the nicest, though the new SRAM Red groupo looks pretty awesome compared to my Dura-Ace setup.), and we all like to stand in ice water every day (I’ll probably write more about that when I post about the running here).

Last week I neglected to post because I was so busy running around New York having fun, and this week I’ve been trying to get used to the thin air of Colorado Springs.

Here’s the short vesion of stuff I’ve been up to.

New York City was hella hot (though in New York they would say “mad hot” and in Boston they would say “wicked hot”, but since I’m still from Seattle I’ll use “hella”), and humid too, so I went to see a movie with my friend Lizzie, who lives in Brooklyn.  I wanted to see batman, until I found out it was 150 minutes long. Then I saw that somebody made a cinema version of Mamma Mia!, and I love musicals, Abba, and blatant overacting. The movie fullfilled all of these loves, so I left happy. Now I have the urge to overact every part of life. Or I did before I got to Colorado Springs.

I’ll be here for the next three weeks training with the National Development Camp at the Olympic Training Center. It’s a lot like summer camp, or freshman year of college. We’re staying in dorms. My roommates are Jahn Dahlz and Greg Billington, and we’re staying in a 12×12 room with cinder block walls - that’s the part that’s like freshman year. So far in three days I’ve taken a rest day (c’mon I had to recover from racing and travel), then swam almost three hours, rode two and a half hours and ran around a lake and around a track and tomorrow we’re doing more of it. Lots more – and that’s the summer camp part. No classes, but endless activities.

I’d post some pictures, but I left a bag with all my computer cables in New York, so along with a dead cell phone battery I also have no way to upload pictures, or Garmin workouts to my computer.

The past week I’ve done way more time on my bike and in the water than pounding pavement. I want to make sure my bruised heel is good and healed (notice my proper homonym usage) before I abuse it too much. Greg’s aqua jogging (he calls it water-running) recommendations have been helpful to up my running hours.

Speaking of Greg Remaly, he showed up at Loren’s last night just before 10pm, which meant I was good for about 5 minutes of welcoming him before I hit the hay. We’re both joining Loren in the Belvedere Lagoon at some awful hour of the morning (it’s not as bad as my 5am workouts in Seattle).

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This is a ride I did a week ago, and that I’m planning to drag Greg along on. I’m excited because when he passed me on the bike at Scott Tinley’s Triathlon last September he was sticking his tongue out like a dog, and I want to see if he really does that on every ride. Here’s the video, fast forward to 3 minutes 30 seconds to see what I’m talking about.

And here’s the elevation profile for the ride we’ll do, thanks to my Garmin Forerunner 305, and Motionbased. (motionbased.com uses topographic data to make corrections to inherently poor elevation data produced by GPS signals. On the Edge 705, however, there’s a barometric altimeter which makes the altitude readings dead on.)

My HR had more peaks, but when I put the two lines on the same graph it was too hard to read.

Lastly, here’s a race report from Alcatraz that I wish I could put my own name on. It’s Lazy Ben’s Laziness Report (with pics!) Thanks to Peggy for that link, as I rarely scroll through Slow Twitch (nothing wrong with the STers). Lazy Ben actually took pictures while swimming in the race. That’s sweet.

I’ve been in California (specifically Tiburon, north of San Francisco) since Wednesday night. I’m staying with Loren Pokorny and his three women, Greta (the actual head of the house), Sada and Piper (who, despite being born into a post 9/11 world, still find a way to terrorize Loren daily).

For the last month Loren has written about a muffin recipe he got from Desiree Ficker so many times I’ve nearly stopped reading his blog (actually when the sun came out in Seattle I fell behind reading friend’s blogs and haven’t caught up - I’m not sorry about this, Sun in Seattle is as rare as a LMAO blog entry, and I believe Seattlites should get an extra three sick days a year for each of those days.)

I’ve digressed. The "memorial muffins" were great, pumpkiny, and moist, and chewy on the top. Good enough to mention in one blog post, maybe two - once the 24 muffins are gone and I can give a final score for who ate the most muffins. Right now the score is Loren 7.5, Ben 5. It’s been about 36 hours since he made them.

I was able to swim in the Belvedere-Tiburon Lagoon on Friday morning. It’s this shallow little lake that gets filled from ocean water and stays 15-20 degrees warmer than the Bay. We swim a little over a mile at 5:45, which is way too early. Loren asked me to watch his stroke while he flailed after the rest of the group, and I realized he swims entirely with his arms, and uses no core strength at all. It’s as though his underdeveloped arms (if Piper told one of her classmates her daddy could beat up their daddy, she would be flat out lying) are trying to drag a flimsy bag through the water. To make matters worse, all he thinks about are his arms, so they follow no natural plane of motion. His hand exits the water, bends in a way that reminds me of the robot scene in Eurotrip, then enters directly in front of his face and pushes water forward. There is no grace or balance. The improvements he made after our last lesson have been lost to hours of solitary swimming.

It seems like I’m really ripping on Loren (to some extent I am), but this is merely a cruel way of introducing a broader epidemic and a look into some possible solutions to subpar swimming abilities among 99% of triathletes.

There seems to be a lack of knowledge with regards to swim technique. People who try learning to swim at age 30 have no good resource for becoming fast. The American Red Cross has a well planned out schedule of classes to teach young children to swim, but many of the classes don’t apply to adults, and aren’t designed to make people into competitive swimmers. Masters Swimming programs around the country are coached in apathy. Masters coaches, even those few that know how to coach good technique, generally believe that masters swimmers are a bunch of complainers that are there for a workout and don’t care about anything else - so we give them the hardest set they can handle in the time allowed, some do it, others sit on the all or do their own version, and everyone seems content.

Let’s compare this to Tennis. Adults that want to play tennis, even recreationally, will get weekly tennis lesson. There are people at every tennis club in the nation that are highly trained tennis instructors, and their specialty is teaching adults. Why is there not the same demand in swimming? I can understand that recreational swimmers may not care about being fast, but much like tennis, swimming well is a lot more fun that dragging yourself through the water. (I would also argue that swimming takes more technique)

I haven’t yet developed the "Ben Collins’ method to swim instruction", or a good solution (yet), but for everyone reading I have some advice.

First, go find a competent swim instructor, pay for lessons (these are usually less than a massage, but more than a bottle of decent wine -$40-$70 for an hour, depending on where you live). Try to get some drills you can work on on your own. Not every drill is right for every swimmer, so having a coach / instructor that knows why you do a drill is important (ask why, they should be able to answer).

Second, when you go to a masters workout, ask the coach to look at your stroke. If it’s a good / competent coach, they should be excited that somebody there actually cares. I almost always ask my coach to watch me swim ("are my hips staying in line?" "am I crossing over?" "does something look wrong?" - something almost always does).

Third, technique alone will not make you fast. There are a lot of muscles that go into swimming (after cross-country skiing, swimming is the most full body sport) and they need to be trained. Use stretch cords on land to build the proper muscles. It’s much easier to follow the right path with your arms on land than in the water where you’re trying to balance.

Fourth, SHUT UP & SWIM. There’s no use in paying for a swim instructor, a pool membership, and the time to gain strength if you never get around to putting in the yards. Coaches have always told me it takes 10,000 strokes for a change to feel natural. At 15 strokes per length that’s 750 lengths of the pool, or 18750 yards, or nearly eleven miles. For college swimmers that’s a day and a half they have to think about entering farther out or pressing with their chest. For most triathletes that could be half a month. If you want to improve, keep your head wet.

Meanwhile, there is hope for Loren, and the rest of the late bloomers in the swimming world - I’m going to find a better way to make you faster.

Recently I was browsing through some other triathlon blogs and I saw two posts that peaked my interest. One person was preparing for a race, which he described as a "training race". To him it meant that he should put no focus on the race, and instead he would train beforehand in such a way as to ensure he would be tired the day of the race (something like a long run, or a tempo run the day before, after a hard week of training.). The second person was posing a question, "Should I taper or train right through?" She didn’t literally mean taper in the way I think of the word. To me a full taper is a 14 to 21 day shift in training in which quality increases and quantity of training decreases - dramatically - so that by the end the athlete can perform at absolute peak. You can’t do this very often, so it’s best only to taper fully at the end of the season, and maybe come close at a focus race before a mid-season break. What the second blogger meant is "should I rest for my race?" The answer of course, is yes, which I believe completely. A rest - for the purpose of this article - is a short break in training stress to allow the body to adapt to the training. Even if the race is a "training race" it cannot serve as any benchmark for performance if you show up dragging heels from peak training. There are several reasons I don’t believe in "training races", but first let me give a little history of the subject from my own experience.

In competitive swimming the season goal is always a time. For instance, my goal my freshman year in college was to qualify for US Nationals in at least one event. It didn’t matter which race I made the time at, or how many people I beat (or lost to) during the season. All that mattered was if I was able to swim a 400IM faster than the qualifying time of 3:56.87. My team also had a goal, and that was to place as high as possible in the conference championships. In order to achieve both goals, the team policy at Columbia was to only taper once, at the end of the season. We trained through every dual meet we swam during the season, and the harder our training was, the more we would do before a race. Coming off our winter training trip to Puerto Rico, we showed up at Dartmouth to do a 6k workout early in the morning before our dual meet, then stayed after the meet for an additional 2k "loosen down". My best time in season that year was a 4:01.20, but at the end of the season when I finally tapered, I swam a 3:54.25.

So I know what it’s like to train through races, and I still believe that a true taper (along with shaving your legs) is something special, that should be reserved for the really big focus race.

Resting, on the other hand, is as important (or more) than training. Even when we swam six thousand yards the morning of a dual meet, we didn’t do any test sets, and nothing on the menu had enough spice to really hinder us. We were coming off of averaging 15k a day, so 6 grand was still a rest.

Rest becomes more important for longer races. You never see marathon runners go for a 60 minute tempo run the day before the race. A sprint distance triathlon is no marathon, but it is still more physically taxing than a typical swim meet (unless you do the 1650, 500 and 400IM, in which case your whole weekend was pretty much trashed after a Friday dual meet). A couple days of easy training will not make you slower, but it will allow you to race at your ability on race day.

Aside from the physiological need for rest leading up to an endurance race, there’s also a monetary, social, and logistical need to rest. When we go to a race we pay (more and more each year) for the unique ability to have a controlled course, and other competitors to compare yourself to. After weeks of training by ourselves the majority of the time, the race allows us to socialize with hundreds of other athletes, and to find out if riding the trainer to episodes of ‘24′ is really paying off. We get up hours before daylight and travel long distances for this opportunity, and we do it because we want to test ourselves. If you have no intention of performing well then you shouldn’t show up to the race. There is no mathematical formula for converting a tired triathlon to a rested triathlon, and there is definitely no handicap for over training.

Periodization of training is no new concept. We stress, we recover. Where people get stuck is they think the athlete that stresses their body the most is the one that wins, but in reality, it’s the athlete that recovers the best, and is therefore able to add more stress sooner without overtraining (when your body breaks down rather than adapting). You need rest, so why not plan your periodized training so that a couple of days before your race you are in the "back off and allow the body to recover" portion? If you race during the over-stress phase, there’s a good chance you’ll cross that line into overtraining - at which point you will be forced to cut back - and it’s almost certain that you will under-perform to your potential.

I talked to Macca in Florida last month about the team racing he did in Europe. He told me the team sponsors pretty much owned the athletes. He raced over 60 times a season, so often he would race Friday then fly out to a Sunday race. Even with this race schedule, he still rested for races. This was the weekly training Chris told me he did:

M: rest

Tu: pick it up a bit

We: hard workout

Th: recover

F: Race

Sa: recover

Su: Race

Sixty races a year, and Chris McCormack was still resting a full day for each, plus a rest day. I guarantee Macca is better able to recover than 99.9% of the triathletes out there, so why on earth would a triathlete racing 10-15 times a year think he/she can get away with less than two days rest before a race?

"Training Race" is an absurd term. You train to race. You don’t race to train. Unrested racing is just a losers way of preparing an excuse.

I don’t feel like writing today, so I’m posting a video from my ride instead.

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