Ninety days into training anywhere from one to three hours a day, six days a week, I’ve learned a lot about what my body can and can’t do. I’ve pushed myself past limits I never thought I could reach. But as a result, I’ve had to learn to manage pain, along with proper eating and stretching habits. Hard work and consistent effort within workouts is only half the battle. Believe it or not, what you do to keep your body healthy outside those workouts can be the hardest part. These three keys have kept my body from falling apart:

Feed the Machine

Eating a lot not only sounds easy, but pleasurable to most. Many people workout to lose weight. Not me. Putting on muscle mass has always been an uphill battle for me. I started training at 155 pounds and have had to eat a lot more than I’m used to just to maintain that. It’s not as fun as it sounds; counting calories takes time. But it’s important for me to replace all the calories I lose on a daily basis in order to keep my machine running smoothly. I’ve fell behind, not eating enough some days, and as a result, I felt lethargic and weak. What kind of food you’re putting in your system also matters.  My fitness coach, jonnyj, recommended an intake of 50 percent carbohydrates, 25 percent protein and 25 percent fat. (Go to sparkpeople.com to set up a free account that helps you calculate calories and figure out percentages of fat, carbohydrates and protein.)

“If you can get people to eat raw or fresh food as much as possible, get their calorie intake where it needs to be, and if you can get them to eat the proper percentages from fats, carbs and protein—if you can do those three things, you’ll change a person’s world,” jonnyj says. “Because nobody I know can do that right.”

As far as supplements go, I like to buy protein powder, which isn’t a must, but I’d rather be on the safe side to make sure I’m repairing the muscles I break down, and I don’t have a ton of food with protein laying around the house. On three-hour training days and long workouts, I use Accelerade, a hydration supplement that replaces sodium, electrolytes, carbohydrates and protein. This helps both performance and recovery.

Focus on Form

When I started training, jonnyj told me it was important to make it to his group workouts/classes so he could make sure I’m learning proper workout habits. “If you start off doing it improperly, it’s very hard to change bad habits later,” he said.

A classic example is running. “Historically, most coaches have said, ‘well, you run the way you run,’” jonnyj said. “They don’t worry too much about that. I 100 percent disagree with that. There’s as much technique and form to running as with any other discipline or sport there is.”

Growing up playing a variety of sports, I always thought I ran properly. It’s pretty hard to screw that up, right? Wrong. I, like many people, was a heal-striker, which means I’d stride out and land on my heal and roll through. It doesn’t feel like you’re doing it, and it’s almost impossible to realize you’re doing it, but most people do. This bad habit increases the impact on your joints, putting three times your body weight on your ankles and knees and seven times your body weight on your hips. Most running injuries (planter fasciitis, Achilles tendonitis and runner’s knee being the most common) stem from heal-striking, which jonnyj said is often a result of improperly designed running shoes.

“A good way to test out that theory is to take off your shoes and go run down the street on the tar and see if you heal strike, because I bet you won’t,” he explained. “You’ll run up on the ball of your foot like a sprinter. The fastest runners in the world right now we’re finding out are the fastest because of their running form and technique. Most of them grew up running barefoot, so they don’t heal strike.”

Learning proper form on my bike has also been a key to staying healthy, while getting stronger and faster. I was used to pushing down on the pedals, but now that I have clipless pedals and shoes, I’ve learned to focus on pulling up on the pedals to get consistent force all the way around on my pedaling rotation.

Frequent Foam Use

Getting sore muscles, especially in your legs, is an inevitable result of training. Stretching is a must to keep your flexibility and it helps alleviate pain, but it’s not effective enough to loosen the knots that develop deep in your muscle tissue. Direct and painful pressure is the only way to eliminate and prevent muscle knots, and the best and cheapest way to do this is with a foam roller. This firm foam log, usually six inches in diameter, costs less than $20 (I bought one at StartLine Running Store in Minnetonka), a much cheaper alternative to a massage therapist. 

You use your body weight by rolling your legs’ tender areas against the roller—like a rolling pin against lumps of bread dough. The key areas I try to hit are my IT bands, which run from your hip on the side of your thigh down to your knee, and calves. This hurts—a lot, especially at first! But the more you do it, the less intense the pain is over time. I try doing this every other day for a total of about 30 minutes—which is easy when you get some downtime in front of the television. The foam roller goes a long way in preventing future injuries, and the pain is well worth the gain in the long run.

Bobby Hart will be blogging about his journey from an average Joe to (hopefully) a triathlete sporadically throughout his training until the day of the Maple Grove Triathlon on August 28. Feel free to pass along feedback or advice to bobby.hart@tigeroak.com. He's going to need it.
Learn more about Dare to Tri at www.maplegrovetriathlon.com.