It was one of those days. You know, where it’s 100 degrees, and you’re running intervals on a black track that’s so hot your feet start to burn through the soles. You decide to take extra rest after one of the intervals so that you can run to the far end of the soccer fields where there are sprinklers shooting cold water – pure, refreshing, revitalizing, geysers of relief from the relentless sun! – but just as you tilt your head back and leap in front of the gushing jet, the sprinklers shut off. Not so much as a stray drop of mist survives long enough to make contact with your skin. Defeated, overheated, and depleted, you go back to the black all-weather surface to suffer through the rest of the workout.

It was that kind of day.

Well, I’m back in Colorado Springs after two weeks of mostly ups, and a big down to finish off the trip. Like I mentioned in my last blog, I had a lot of fun the first week in Seattle. Then I kicked my training into high gear, put in a solid week of training leading up to my birthday last sunday. It was my “golden” birthday, meaning my age and the day of the month were the same. I turned 27 on the 27th. I had a bunch of friends over for pizza making and cake, and got to see Courtenay for the first time in well over a month.

That was a big up, but also the big down. Courtenay has been struggling with my travel and the difficulties of a boyfriend living at the training center and prioritizing an Olympic Dream over her. And I admit it. I have been so involved in training that I’ve allowed us to spend more than five of the past six months apart. Not to mention that visitor limitations at the training center make it really hard for her to visit me here. For me it was all short term. Two years until the Olympics, and perhaps I could move to Boulder before then, and what’s two years in a long term relationship? But we aren’t on the same page. She’s moving on. I’m back to being single. Not too thrilled about it, but hopefully she’ll be happier for it.

After Courtenay collected her belongings in Seattle, she came back to Colorado Springs with me for a short (2 hour) visit to collect her things from my room at the training center. Saying goodbye sucked. I think this may be the most I’ve ever mentioned my relationship (21 months of it!) on the blog, having tried to keep some level of personal-life privacy, it’s certainly weighing heavily on my mind, and the causes for the breakup are a dynamic of my lifestyle, a sacrifice that many of my peers have also made, that most people wouldn’t think of when they think of “young up-and-coming pro triathletes”.

To finish on a positive note, I came back to Colorado to find that my first batch of home-brew Kombucha is finished, and it’s delicious! Perfect timing too, since Dave’s G.T. Kombucha has been temporarily pulled from the shelves in many states, pending a liquor board review of the alcohol content. I’m pretty sure it’s negligible, but it’ll be interesting to find out if we will need to show our IDs to buy Kombucha from Wholefoods.

I wrote a race report for Hy-Vee, but then I was sucked into a whirlwind of fun during my visit home to Seattle – and now I can’t find it. The short version is this: I swam really well, missed a $5k bonus out of the water by 5s, rode with 50 or 60 other men on the narrow bike course, had bad positioning into T2, and ran from the back of the pack up to 25th place by the end. I’m happy with it.

After the race I flew home to Seattle for a week “off”, where I was under coaches orders to “play hard”. This is not a task that I’ve ever had trouble with. I went sailing with friends for two days, I saw friends I haven’t seen all year, baked banana bread with my family (gluten free!), ran trails through muddy forests, and went rowing in a double with Mom.

The rowing was the scariest of those adventures. For a swimmer, who is perfectly willing to jump in the lake and swim, I was unjustifiably petrified of flipping the rowing shell. My mom didn’t seem nervous at all, though I think she expected me to have a little more natural talent.

Seattle’s summer starts in the end of June, and it’s fun to see all the pasty Seattleites crowding every inch of open space (all those green trees can make it hard to avoid the shade) for the full 20 hours of sunshine we had on father’s day. Or maybe summer started the day after father’s day. I can’t remember. I decided to stay in Seattle an extra week and begin my training block here. My reasoning is pretty simple: I love Seattle, and it’s nice to be around my family and friends. It’s been a really good trip, and I will be going back to Colorado refreshed and excited to be there again.

Oh yeah, how can I forget about the newest member of my family?! Carter Lamb, my sister’s first child celebrated his 7th month of life last week! I have to say, the little guy is growing on me quickly, even if seeing my sister’s eyes on a little kid brings waves of terror into my subconscious. Hopefully he doesn’t learn to torture me like she did. 🙂

I’m sitting here in the hotel lobby with Matt Chrabot watching the women race on the internet. They’re physically about a mile away from us, but since it’s 90 degrees outside, neither of us wish to venture out before tomorrow’s race. So far I’ve seen that the swim was a sluggish 19 minutes with some of the typically slow swimmers exiting the water within 30 seconds of the leaders. Then the internet froze.

This morning I slept in as long as I could. Which is to say, I forced myself out of bed when it was clear I would miss breakfast if I slept any longer. 12 hours of sleep is pretty much the best feeling in the world, though later on when I was running in the heat I was envious that Matt and Jarrod were done early.

We’ve been eating at a Kabob shop that serves massive plates of chicken ad rise with some kind of greek-like sauce. It’s delicious, and at 6 euros for a meal it’s also much less expensive than the typical.

The video feed just started working again. Jill made i into the front group after 3 laps of 8. OH NO, she caught on right before the hill, and then they focused the camera on her while she slowly suffered and was dropped off the back. Barry, the announcer was focused on Jill talking about how she was overextended and just suffering. That’s terrible, she basically dragged Daniela Ryf into the front group then blew up and droped back into the chase pack. Ryf couldn’t have asked for a better domestique! I’m sorry jill, I was yelling for you (literally, the people in the hotel were loking around the corner to find out what I was yelling about).

OOOH!! Jenna Shoemaker is bridging up by herself from the chase group!  Oh no, but Amanda Felder had to pull our – and now Barry is calling her a novice. I can’t wait to hear what Barry says about me tomorrow. “Collins, one of the young american talents.” or he’ll make the country mistake like he did in Ishigaki, “That looks like a Russian athlete. Likely a swim biker. . .”

Wow. Haskins put forth a great race. 5th place, taking down some big names. Awesome. Best US finish at a WCS race this year. Cool!

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Continuing the running commentary. I’ve been taking pictures all day, and I’ll post them when I have a) a camera cable and b) a strong enough internet connection to upload photos. It’s getting close to bed time here in Madrid. I’m a little nervous. Tomorrow is definitely the biggest race I’ve done in my career. At the same time, that sort of takes the pressure off. Whatever happens, I’m going to learn something, do a few things right and a few things wrong. I love racing, so for better or worse, it’ll love it.

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My mom and sister both called me in Madrid. Skype doesn’t work here, so I sent out an email to my family, girlfriend and coach with the hotel info so they could call and give some words of encouragement. Obviously I’m right in always putting family first. 🙂

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Alright, check out triathlon.org tomorrow to watch my race live. It’ll be 4am on the west coast, 7am in New York, and 1am in Hawaii. (C’mon Team Jet, just stay up and watch when you get back from the bars!) You have to create a username to watch, but you only have to pay if you want to watch the race later on as a recording. Finally, I’m in a race with live video and audio feed! Plus it’ll be on Universal Sports as a 1 hour recap in the coming weeks (check you listing).

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That’s all for now. I’m off to bed!

Should we train with drag suits, or is there an advantage to swimming faster in practice? It’s an important question that takes me a while to qualify and even longer to answer. If you’re short on time, learn to skim.

When I was growing up my swim coaches would always encourage us to train with as much drag as we could handle. I remember once in high school buying a size 42 drag suit to go over my size 28 under-suit. Another time my coach had us all bring in old t-shirts to wear for a “strength block” at the beginning of the season. Our suits would get old, faded, holey, and eventually they would turn to shreds – at which point we would buy an even bigger drag suit. On my first trip to the Olympic Training Center, back in 1997 for a US Swimming Select Camp, we were warned not to bring any suits that were decaying to the point that they may clog the pool filers. Basically, everyone swam with baggy drag suits that would never last more than a month or two, and we’d keep them for 6. It was normal.

It was after the 90’s had passed that the trend started to change. In 2000 I got my first polyester drag suit from Speedo – a size 34 – which seemed tight at the time. By the time I was a sophomore in college I had downsized to a size 28 of the same polyester style (the poly trainers never fade like the nylon suits) and that’s what I wore until I discovered Splish custom suits at the beginning of 2009. The attraction of custom briefs and colorful practice suits is all it took to make me forget about two decades of training every yard with a baggy brief.

Okay, I didn’t really forget about it. I wrote Splish and asked them to design a poly-mesh trainer after the Speedo/TYR suits, which – I pointed out – would also provide more surface area for men’s suit designs. As of yet, they haven’t taken my advice.

When I started swimming with Cascade Swim Club last year in Seattle (coached by one of the most old school coaches around, who, ten years ago, certainly would have encouraged everyone to wear massive baggy suits) I noticed that the drag trend seems to be universally fading. Many of the younger kids are wearing jammers (the ugly spandex shorts that swimmers are now racing in), though luckily – with the exception of Hunter Kemper – I’ve never seen a good swimmer train in a jammer. Most of the senior swimmers, are wearing tight polyester briefs – a sign that drag is no longer being encouraged like it was in the 90’s.

All this I have been observing with only mild interest until a few weeks ago when I was given a size 30 TYR Poly Mesh Trainer (drag suit) from USAT. I decided that it was time to get my swimming back on par with my ego, and I resolved that the drag suit would help me raise the bar. Unfortunately, it also made me much slower than I anticipated. At this point, I’ll admit, I came looking for a reason to take off the suit.

I started my research locally within the triathletes at the Olympic Training Center. Brandon Rakita (XTerra Pro and USAT Bike Mechanic) and Greg Billington (5th at World University Games last weekend) are the only two people in our practice who wear drag suits, though both take them off for the main set (which is backwards, and I’ll explain that in a minute). After one practice where I had struggled just to make the normally easy sendoff, I asked Brian Fleischmann causally, “how big of a difference do you think drag suits make?” To which he replied, “I don’t know, man, maybe a second or two per hundred.”

That surprised me. I figured maybe a second, but certainly no more. I turned to Hunter and asked him the same question. “Yeah, man, it makes a big difference, I’d say two or three seconds depending on your stroke.”

I was starting to feel better about my recent swims, but it certainly didn’t answer the real question. “So why don’t you wear a drag suit?” I directed toward Brian as Hunter hustled off to the treadmill for his post-swim trot.

“I tried it. Andy [Potts] and [his coach] are into the drag thing, but it just doesn’t work well for me.”

“Do you just like to swim faster in practice, or was it something else?”

“No, I just think it builds more strength in the upper body, and that extra mass won’t help your run.” This was a good insight, and it got me thinking about how I feel when I wear a drag suit.

On the days I wore a drag suit I felt low in the water. Not just slower, but physically less buoyant. My stroke rate would be higher than normal, and it was harder for me to get a good glide in the front of my stroke. Until now I had just told myself I was weak, but Brian’s comment inspired me to look outside the locker room to confirm my suspicions of what has caused the decline in drag suit favorability.

At this point I had decided that a combo approach, much like Greg’s was probably best. Though I argue that the main set is the only time for a drag suit to be worn, if at all. Warm-up, cool-down, drills, and kick sets are the parts of practice where you should be the most aware of your body. It’s the time to put all of your attention to technique and body position. The drag suit changes your hydrodynamics so that the body awareness drills do very little to improve your feel for the water. It’s like placing the propeller on a boat according to where it was most efficient on a completely different hull. For the main set, however, the goal is strength, so why not throw on a drag suit?

For this I emailed the two most qualified people I know: Brian Davis, who was born without coordination or any god-given talent, but who managed to become one of the best distance swimmers in the country (15:05 in the 1650y free) through hard work and a great technical coach (my second contact) Kyle Johnson (of Issaquah Swim Team).

This was my email:

A few weeks ago I went back to wearing a drag suit. It’s amazing me how much slower I’m swimming, and I’ve also noticed some stroke changes. I can’t get the same glide between strokes and I have to have more of a continuous stroke (I’m not sure that’s a bad thing). I know Brian never wore a drag suit, and it seems like the trend in the swimming world is going toward less drag in practice (North Baltimore – think Phelps – is here this week and there’s a definite mix in preference, but I think non-drag suits have the majority). The top two american triathletes take opposing sides. One says the extra drag increases upper body strength and weight, which decreases running speed; the other says that the added strength is what allows you to break somebody off your feet during a race.

What’s your opinion on training with a drag suit?

And their responses:

Kyle:

Personally, I don’t endorse them because they seem to impact the body’s natural buoyancy and create balance and timing issues like you’re experiencing. When your pelvis is pulled down by drag, you’re forced to go to your extremities for stability.

Brian:

Exactly, I think it’s a power exercise, which wouldn’t have made any sense for my frame or style. If your stroke is similar to what it was when last we talked, the *last* thing you need is more power emphasis. You need to work on getting those hips on the surface and relaxing your shoulders. That said, you shouldn’t be doing much gliding, either. Try to just slow down your rotation, but keep your hands moving continuously, without pausing up top. Pausing at the “glide phase” of your stroke is just a form of mental rest, anyway, and provides almost no physical rest, since you need to reinvest energy in the power phase to get you started again after the glide. If you think of the analogy of rowing, it takes significantly less effort to have a smooth, even, symmetrical stroke than to pull really hard, rest, then pull hard again.

As for drag suits, I think the only major benefit is mental, since the contrast in sensation between training in a drag suit and racing in a fast suit is so huge. But you race in a compressive suit, anyway, so if you just train in a regular suit, you’ll still get that contrast. Besides, you compete in lakes and stuff… it’s not the controlled environment of a pool, where those tiny differences are instantly noticeable. I don’t think that a lot of the training methods in swimming translate well to triathlon, where you don’t have lanes, drafting is legal, and shoving your fist down someone’s throat is a valid maneuver. 🙂

The conclusion? I’m not planning on wearing a drag suit anymore. Perfecting my “feel” for the water – the way I interact with the fluid around me – is more important than the strength that I would gain from the added resistance. But I still maintain that adding resistance for short periods of strength focus, like during the main set, is probably beneficial. Doing the opposite, removing the drag only for the main set, is definitely not the way to go.