by Melanie McQuaid, Triathlete

The off season is a great time to focus on building leg strength because you can focus less on your speed. Doing some cadence work and this on-the-bike strength work together is a great idea, since they will complement each other and cadence does allow you to keep some of your speed intact. This article will focus on the strength component.

If you are doing long rides outside, I would suggest adding some hills. When you ride the hills, instead of trying to go up it fast, put your bike in a big gear and grind it out at about 60 rpm. This will keep your heart rate down and turn the climb into a leg-press workout to build strength in your climbing-specific muscles. You can do this workout off road with a lot of success. If you need to do your long rides indoors still, I would suggest riding at a higher wattage (keep to below 85% perceived effort) with low cadence for 3-8 minutes with 5 minutes in between to mimic a grinding hill interval workout. You can do these intervals both seated and standing but make sure you are comfortable seated because you will mostly stay seated in Ironman and XTERRA racing.

more

Conrad and I had a chance to visit the LA Tri Club on Tuesday and during that appearance someone asked the question “why XTERRA?”. My answer was that despite the fact we train professionally to be the fittest we could possibly be and take the competitive aspect of this race very seriously, the challenge of XTERRA is often the course itself. Your primary objective is finishing the race and your secondary objective is trying to win it. Sunday was a classic example of the most ridiculously hard race course and stacked fields of triathletes from a variety of backgrounds doing battle against the course first and then with one another.

more

I woke up on Saturday January 20th thinking, screw it. I don’t feel like getting on a plane, I am just going back to bed for another few hours and later I will just get up and go suffer on another ride in the rain by myself. Luckily, Ross was making coffee so the thought of drinking some liquid motivation was more enticing than a few more minutes of nap time. I got on the plane, flew to LA, got a car and jetted to Temecula.

more

as reported by Melanie McQuaid on racergirl.com

Maui No Ka Oi…. Maui is the best! How true is that? The Xterra World Championships is held annually at this amazing paradise in the middle of the Pacific. Each year the race lives up to its reputation as a challenging, unpredictable and unforgiving venue. Extensive rain left the course strewn with huge boulders, ruts and grass. The weather was beautiful during the week, but by Sunday high winds made the swim choppy with some decent swells, and on race day the thermostat was turned up quite a bit compared to the rest of the week. The result? Gaps on the swim as weaker swimmers were weeded out, carnage of crashes and flats on the bike course and complete meltdowns by very talented runners in the last portions of the run on the beach as they approached the finish. Epic, brutal, unforgiving and “not fit for man or beast” are some of the descriptions of this race. Never has this race ever been longer or harder than this year, and I am absolutely stunned to have had the race I did on Sunday. I think I had wings. Maybe there was invisible force field protecting me from my near disasters on the bike course, of which there were many. Whatever it was, I managed to leave no doubt as to who brought the best form to Worlds this year. I knew it could be good but I didn’t know just how good my form was. An eight-minute margin to second was well above my expectations, and I can go into the off season totally satisfied that the work, sacrifices and plans I made this year were the right ones. Flippin’ sweet! more