Do Regular On-water Tests or Time Controls

One of the most important things you can do in your training is testing to both assess your progress and your current training state. If you’re racing frequently then you have an opportunity to assess your training through race performances, however race courses and conditions are often drastically different from race to race, which really affects the quality of the information you gather and your ability to draw meaningful insight from it. The best way to assess your progress and state of training on an ongoing basis is to perform standard tests on a regular basis that you can perform in reasonably controllable conditions.

When you’re in the middle of the competitive season it still doesn’t hurt to do periodic dry land testing as a means to assess strength and power maintenance, however the most important testing should be done on the water. When I was paddling on the National Team in C1 we used to test regularly, and at certain times of the year we’d test weekly on the water. Even workouts that weren’t tests per se, were often performed over marked courses in controlled conditions so we could gather data that was useful in both assessing progress and training state (fatigue levels, etc.). I discussed one of those workouts in last week’s Tip of the Week.

Most of the testing we did were simply time controls over race distance (500m or 1000m). You can certainly perform the same tests for SUP if you want. It won’t hurt you and it might be a great way to track your speed endurance development and assess your preparation for the two to three minute sprint to the first buoy in races. However a more appropriate test for SUP might be another one we frequently did for canoe, usually early in the season, over 2000m or 2 km.

2000m is a great distance to test. In canoe a top-level athlete is going to do it between 8:30 and 9:00. Even the best athletes in the world aren’t able to go much longer than 2 minutes using anaerobic metabolism exclusively, so it is great for testing high-level aerobic power. In order to do a really fast 2000m time in this test you need to manage your early anaerobic-alactic effort, settle into the maximum pace that you can travel using aerobic metabolism (i.e. travel just below your anaerobic threshold) and then know when to resume anaerobic effort late in the test so that you hit the finish line just as you’ve maxed out and are about to blow up from accumulation of high blood lactate.

If the very top racers were to do this test on a SUP board my guess is they would do a time between 11:00 and 11:45. My personal best so far is 11:27. An excellent time that isn’t quite world class would be 12:00. Many will struggle to go under 13:00. The approach on a SUP board should be much like it is when doing it in a C1, it’s just that you’ll be travelling a little longer aerobically in the middle section of the test. It’s still a question of maximizing aerobic travelling speed and the amount that you can do anaerobically without accumulating deleterious amounts of blood lactate too soon. If you consider someone doing the test in 12:00 and the fact that most people can’t go longer than 2:00 to 2:15 anaerobically without failing, then the energy profile of the test for that person is:

Anaerobic-alactic: 15 seconds/720 seconds x 100 = 2%

Anaerobic-lactic: 120 seconds/720 seconds x 100 = 17%

Aerobic: 585 seconds/720 seconds x 100 = 81%

If it takes someone longer to do the 2000m than 12:00, then the aerobic contribution will be even greater. Any test that relies this much on aerobic metabolism is a great test for SUP paddlers racing distances of 5 miles or more. However the beauty of doing a 2000m time control instead of a 5 mile test is that it is much easier to repeat and control.

Consider how difficult it is to find a 5-mile stretch of water than isn’t affected by wind, currents or tides. Finding a 2000m stretch of water isn’t always easy, but at just a little over a mile it is certainly easier to find than 5 miles. I can’t stress enough the importance of controlled conditions for your testing. If you want to compare results from test to test in a meaningful way, you need to know that conditions are as consistent as possible from test to test. You want to test yourself and changes in your paddling ability, not the strength of the wind or the amount of tide.

The other reason I think 2000m is a great distance is that as it only takes approximately 12 to 13 minutes or so to complete it doesn’t fatigue you too much when you do the test. The physical toll it takes on you to do an all out 2000m shouldn’t be a lot different than the physical toll of a normal workout. In fact, we used to do 2-3 x 2000m with about 10 minute rest each time we tested. Doing the test repeatedly actually tests your ability to recover from a hard effort and handle a larger volume of hard work. Those are both useful abilities for a SUP racer. Now that I am older and training SUP exclusively I regularly do 2 x 2000m.

Whether you choose to use 2-3 x 2000m as your test or choose a different yet similar distance, this week’s Tip of the Week is to do regular time controls as part of your training to both assess your progress and monitor the affect your training program is having on you. If you test regularly you’ll know what your performance should be and when you see a deviation from your performance norm it can give you valuable insight into the effectiveness of your training program. A performance decline can be an early indication of cumulative fatigue from training and a sign to cut back while an improvement can be an indication that you are rounding into peak form. The point is, if you don’t test regularly you miss the opportunity to acquire this information.

Scout out the water near you and see if you can find a suitable stretch of water, which regularly has neutral conditions, as a course to test on. Then build regularly scheduled time controls into your program. You’ll find that it’s fun to track your progress, that it will help you set goals, and will provide you with valuable information on your training. Give it a try!

Do Speed Training

One of the most important things you can do in training for endurance events, and something that often gets overlooked, is develop your speed.  While it seems counter-intuitive that someone racing a 12-mile race should be training speed, having the abilities that come from regularly training speed at your disposal provides you with a distinct advantage in distance events.

Obviously the first place speed becomes useful in a distance race is on the start.  The ability to sprint off the beach and through the surf, or to break away from the pack in a water start, is extremely important and is often the sole determining factor on whether or not you end up in the first group for the remainder of the race.  We’ve seen that every year at the BOP and at every other big race like the Carolina Cup or Lost Mills.  While there are certainly other skills required to get off the beach quickly, if you don’t have sprinting speed no amount of those other skills is going to help you get in that first draft train.  Training your speed is imperative.

Having the ability to sprint at a high speed also helps in other ways in a race.  When drafting, speed is useful for catching up to the draft train or trying to break away from it.  When you’re downwinding, speed is useful as it can help you catch bumps you might otherwise be unable to get.  To any experienced racer these benefits of speed should be obvious.  But there is another way in which speed is going to help your performance in a distance race that is less obvious, and it has to do with something called a speed reserve.

If you consider that your typical travelling speed in a race is a given percentage of your maximum speed, in theory you might be able to increase your travelling speed if you increase your maximum speed.  Failing that, you will almost certainly be able to travel at the same travelling speed with less effort if you can increase your maximum speed – you’ll be working at a lower percentage of your maximum speed.  This in turn leaves you with the ability to go faster in late stages of the race or have more energy left for your finishing kick.  Either way, a higher maximum speed should allow for improved performance in a distance race, provided you’ve done the rest of the homework you need to do to be successful, both physical and technical.  Speed reserve can therefore be defined as the additional speed you have at your disposal above your travelling speed.

An analogy to speed reserve can be found in the weight room and is typically referred to as a strength reserve.  For example, if your maximum bench press is 150 lbs. and you’re asked to do a test in which you do your maximum number of reps at 100 lbs., you’ll be lifting 66% or your 1RM (one rep max) when you do your test.  However if your maximum is 200 lbs. you’ll be testing at 50% of your 1RM, which should be a lot easier.  In theory, you should easily be able to do a lot more reps in the test because of your greater strength reserve.

So what type of training should you do to develop your speed and establish your speed reserve?    Strictly speaking, doing short sprints in the range of eight to fifteen seconds, which train your anaerobic-alactic physiology and neuromuscular system, develops speed.  This is the type of speed training required for an event like the 100m dash in athletics and forms a large part of the training for the 200m sprint events in canoe/kayak. However in addition to our aerobic system, paddling over distance for longer periods of time requires us to train our anaerobic-lactic system over periods of time from 45 seconds to one minute, so this is the type of high intensity speed training that we really ought to be doing for SUP.   True sprinters would actually call this speed endurance. 

One of the best workouts I’ve done for developing the type of speed that is most useful for SUP is 10 x 1’, all out, with 4’ rest.  When I was training to race C1 over 500m and 1000m, I used to do this session each week during the competitive season, usually on a Thursday evening.   Although there were other workouts that were shorter distance/higher speed that did a better job of developing my speed reserve in C1, this workout was the most valuable for its contribution to development of speed endurance and lactate tolerance.  For a SUP racer competing in long five to twelve mile races 10 x 1’ should be sufficiently above race pace to develop a considerable speed reserve while at the same time developing some other very important abilities that a high level SUP racer needs.

I used to do this session back and forth over a marked 250m course.  I’d do each piece from a dead start and go as far as I could in one minute, with my goal being to go further than 250m each time.  I would paddle easy for the four minutes rest, turning around during this time so I could start the next piece on the 250m course going the opposite direction.  Here is an example of a typical session, this one from August 26, 1983:

 

Piece	Time through 250m	Conditions
1	0:53	No wind both directions
2	0:54
3	0:55
4	0:56
5	0:56
6	0:57
7	0:58
8	0:57
9	0:59
10	0:58

In this workout each piece needs to be an all out effort.  You can’t hold anything back.  Obviously you’ll go the furthest in the first couple of pieces.  In an all out effort of one-minute duration a considerable amount of lactic acid is produced, so let’s imagine that after the first piece blood lactate is 6 – 8 mmol (up from 1 – 2 mmol at rest).  The four minutes of rest does not allow for complete recovery, meaning that at the start of the next piece blood lactate is still elevated above normal, perhaps as high as 4 mmol.  After the second piece blood lactate will be a little higher than after the first, perhaps as high as 10 mmol, and before starting piece three will be maybe 5 – 6 mmol.  Blood lactate will continue to climb through the workout in a similar pattern, meaning that the first few pieces and the last few pieces will have a different training effect.  From a neuromuscular standpoint the last few pieces won’t be as effective for developing speed, but they will be excellent for developing lactate tolerance.  The entire workout is useful for improving lactate clearance as well, which is also useful for a SUP racer. 

Let’s consider a SUP race with a beach start.  You want to be able to sprint as fast as you can off the beach and maintain an aggressive pace for the first few minutes to the first buoy.   You’ll be working anaerobically, but if you’ve trained your speed, speed endurance and lactate tolerance you’ll be strong in this section of the race. At some point you’ll need to settle into your race pace and start working aerobically, and you’re going to find it difficult for a few minutes because of high blood lactate.  But if you’ve done adequate lactate tolerance training you should be able to get through this difficult section of the race while your system works at clearing the lactate you’ve built up.  Then it’s just a question of managing your pacing over the rest of the race, working close to your anaerobic threshold and taking care to not go above threshold for extended periods of time.  If you’ve trained your speed and developed your speed reserve, you should be able to do this at a slightly higher pace than if you’ve just trained aerobically.

There are technical adaptations that arise from training speed as well, which can be described in terms of gears (see “Stroke Rate in SUP Paddling” ).  If you do a workout like the 10 x 1’ I’ve described here on a marked course you’ll be able to monitor your progress in terms of speed and speed endurance.  It won’t just be physiological adaptations that allow you to improve, but also neuromuscular and technical adaptations.  The result of this is that, without realizing it, you’ll develop comfort with new high-end gears that are optimal for the type of sprinting you’re doing.  You’ll be able to take this comfort with these new gears with you into your next race, allowing you to go faster, more efficiently, when you use them. 

There are many advantages that can be derived from an endurance athlete training speed and speed endurance on a weekly basis.  This week’s Tip of the Week is to incorporate this type of work into your training program once a week to develop a speed reserve and both physiological and technical adaptations that lead to improved performance. There are lots of workout possibilities.  If you’re going to try my 10 x 1’ with 4’ rest, I’d suggest you start by doing just six.  You’ll likely have a significant drop off in the distance you travel from your first to your sixth.  When you can minimize the drop off try adding another piece and continue in this fashion until you can do all ten.  It’s very challenging, and you’ll want to make sure the next workout is fairly easy to allow for some extra recovery. Give it a try.  You’ll notice a difference.
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