It’s August and that usually means starting to round a corner. After a tough July of hard training and consequently lacklustre racing, I can feel myself starting to round into form as I had planned. My speed in workouts in slowly getting faster and it feels like the long winter and spring is starting to pay some dividends. I also managed to set a 10k PB by almost 45 seconds in Squamish last weekend with a 37:34.
With important races like Nationals in Kelowna coming up, it also means that all the small details surrounding training become more important. Things like proper recovery, nutrition and sleep all come to the forefront (although to be honest they really should be all year round).
And I’ve found a most unlikely ally in helping me with these details: my iPhone. I know, those of you who don’t have one are sick of hearing how great they are but there is a reason you keep hearing it over and over again. So, a couple of iPhone apps that I’ve found have been a great help in some of my training details.
Sleep Cycle
The perfect app for tracking how much and how well you’re sleeping. Making use of the accelerometer in the iPhone, Sleep Cycle measures the movement of your mattress (you have to keep your phone next to your pillow as you sleep) to determine how deep your sleep is. The less movement you make, the deeper the sleep. You can then review your sleep pattern in the morning and even set your alarm to go off within a given range of times when you are in a more awake state rather than a deep sleep (it really does make a difference).
While those are cool features, the most useful part of the app is its unbiased recording of how much sleep you get. I always assumed I got plenty of sleep (at least 8 hours a night) but after a week or two of using the app I quickly realized I was fooling myself and that the 8 hours was simply a best case. My average was closer to just less than 7.
So I’ve been trying to get that average up to 8 with the help of the app but it’s still a battle.
Lose It!
A weight loss app for an athlete seems counter-intuitive but hear me out. Like the Sleep Cycle app, Lose It! has features built in that I find incredibly useful.
The most basic being able to simply track calories. It allows you to enter and save any food, create recipes (so you don’t have to enter each individual ingredient in something like a smoothie), and quickly copy meals from previous days (great for someone like me who eats basically the same breakfast everyday). It also allows you enter in calories burnt from exercises (which I take from my heart rate monitor or estimate from swimming) to ensure a calorie balance each day.
The main reason I started (and continue) using the app though was its ability to then take what you were eating and calculate percentage of calories were coming from fats, carbs, and protein (as well as the absolute amounts of each). In the spring I had run into GI problems on a couple of runs and knowing that I had a tendency to eat a lot of carbs (even before all the energy drinks, bars, and gels) and thought that might be culprit. Sure enough, after a week of using the app I saw what I thought I might find, an inordinately high level of carbs.
I adjusted my diet and now I’m able to make sure I keep a decent balance in what I eat (and have avoided any GI problems). It should also help in making sure I get a few extra carbs in a couple days before races.
So if you’ve got an iPhone, give these apps a try (Lose It! is free and Sleep Cycle is less than $2 if I remember correctly).
Now lets just hope this rain quits before my last triathlon in prep for Nationals at Walnut Grove tomorrow.
