Just to be clear, I’ve never been one to spend hours on forums, social networking sites, or surfing youtube for hours on end, looking for funny stuff – I leave that to my wife.

But after numerous invites to be added as a friend, I have finally given in and created a Facebook account.

So here’s the challenge:

If you haven’t already asked me to add you as a friend or received an invite from me, go ahead and add me as your friend today. I’d like to see just how quickly I can reach 1000 friends – yes, call me competitive, you know I am!

And as a little thank-you, every friend added between now and 10 December will receive a free copy of my new report, “7 Workouts to Turbocharge your Training.”But you’ll have to be my friend on Facebook to get it.

Now, back to work, I can’t spend all day on Facebook!

I’ve just posted a new screencast tutorial: Setting up Daily Metrics in your Training Peaks account.

Click here to watch it

Sorry, this one is for clients only, but there’s lots of other content on the way.

We all know that it’s important to change our training as the cold of winter sets in. It’s not a great idea to be training as if there’s a race around the corner, unless you want to be the legendary “King of December!” So essentially, it’s a change to much more aerobic mileage, efficiency workouts and an opportunity to build back some of that basic and core strength by spending some time in the gym.

But what about our nutrition? Does it need to change too? And if so, what changes can we make to get the most out of our training?

First, we need to realise that for most of us the training is the easy part. A disciplined diet is very difficult for an average modern human. A twentieth century diet is actually not that conducive to being the best you can be as an endurance athlete. And as any bodybuilder will tell you: Nutrition is 90% of the game!

So here are just a few suggestions that will help you to achieve the maximum out of your winter training:

• Cut out the sugar! This goes for the summer too. Simple sugar causes spikes in blood glucose that initiate your body’s defence mechanism, the final result of which is an increase in stored body fat. Have a careful look at where there is sugar in your diet and get rid of it. If you do nothing else, this tip will radically alter your body composition. The exception to this rule is while exercising, but even here there are rules to be followed – look out for a future post or contact me at Will Newton Multisport Coaching to get the lowdown on how to make the most of your workout nutrition.
• Limit the starchy carbs in your diet. Rice, pasta, white flour & potatoes are the staple of so many athletes’ diets. And yet they’re actually often present in such great abundance that they constitute a negative rather than a positive for most athletes. Unless you’re stick-thin, you’d be better off getting your carbohydrates from other vegetables. Not only does your body have to work harder to digest these, thus avoiding a similar glucose spike to sugar, but they also contain a lot more in the way of vitamins, minerals & enzymes, which actually help with digestion & boost your energy levels.
• Make sure you’re getting enough protein in your diet. Endurance athletes need similar amounts of protein to bodybuilders (as much as 2g per kg bodyweight per day!). And if you’re adding time in the gym to your routine, you definitely need to keep an eye on this.
• Avoid the fat-free stuff. You’re not doing yourself any favours by eating this highly processed rubbish. Rather look for wholefood options that look like food and aren’t packed with all kinds of additives that are intended to replace the flavour that fat gives to food. Also, your body needs fat in order to aid healing (does this sound like recovery?), balance your hormones & if you’re trying to shift those extra pounds, convince your primal brain that you’re not starving!

The above is by no means an exhaustive list, but if you just follow these few points, you’ll already see & feel a dramatic difference.

Three posts in row which preview 2009: I really do have to write about something else… or do I?

Today it’s the new Dura-Ace groups, including their revolutionary electronic shifting. Well, not actually revolutionary: Mavic had something back in the early to mid 90′s, called “Zap” Shifters (if I remember correctly). A friend of mine bought Simon Lessing’s old bike which had these on it. Did they work? I don’t really know, but he liked them.

Anyway, have a look at the 2009 Dura-Ace here.

The Tour de France route for 2009 has been announced. And here it is.

The 2009 Tour de France Route

One notable feature about the 2009 tour is that it’s allegedly the first in which there will be a mountain stage on the penultimate day, and it’s the one to Mont Ventoux – so in the same way as this year, the race could be decided on the day before Paris.

Will Lance be there? Well that’s the question. Last I heard, he was fed up with all the drugs-talk from the TdF organisation and the French authorities and was threatening to do the Giro instead.

And finally, should you prefer simply to watch the promo video for next year’s race, here it is…

embedded by Embedded Video

I had it marked in my diary, the date that the Tour de France & Etape routes would be announced. And either I was misinformed, or I made the old “hands like feet” clerical error, but heading off to the appropriate websites this morning, I found I was a bit late.

So for those of you who still don’t know, the Etape is scheduled for 20 July 2009. The day starts in Montélimar and concludes atop the infamous Mont Ventoux, 172km and five climbs later.

Mont Ventoux has a place in cycling’s history, albeit a tragic and a controversial one.

On Friday 13 July 1967, Tom Simpson – considered by many to be Britain’s best tour cyclist – collapsed and died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux. Tom was the first British cyclist to wear the yellow jersey and to finish in the Tour de France top ten.

In 2000, the race up Mont Ventoux was the cause of a major feud between Lance Armstrong and Marco Pantani. Armstrong insisted that his gift of the stage victory to Pantani was a tribute to a great champion, Pantani took it as an insult.

Nine years ago, the Etape was stopped before competitors could get to the top of Mont Ventoux due to freezing weather and a hailstorm. Hopefully 2009 will be a different story.

And just in case you’d like to know what what the route profile looks like, here it is…

L'Etape 2009 - All the way up Mont Ventoux!

Photo from www.letapedutour.com, where you can find loads more info and enter the event if you’re so inclined – be quick about it though, the Etape is usually full by February.

So you’ve finished your racing season and (hopefully) you’ve had a bit
of an end-of-season break. Hopefully, you’ve also taken the time to
have a look at what you did well during the season as well as those
things that you could do better in the future.

Most of us are very good at being hyper-self-critical, and I’d urge
you to start by looking for the successes you’ve had in the last year.
I define success as anything positive that has come out of my training
and racing. So ask yourself, what was good? Did you set any new PB’s,
did you move up the field relative to your competition, did you
complete a new distance? You could also ask yourself whether you did a
part of a race which had always been a problem, better than on
previous occasions. Did you learn something new or change the way you
did something? And above all, did you have fun doing it?

Write all of these down on an A4 sheet of paper, read them through a
few times and then give yourself a pat on the back… well done!

Now look at the areas where you’d like to improve next season. But be
specific: “I’d like to improve my swim” isn’t good enough. What
EXACTLY would you like to improve? What aspect of each part of your
sport do you need to work on? What bits lose you time in every race?

Once you’ve written all these down on an A4 sheet, work out what
you’re going to do about them. Perhaps you need some coaching advice,
a specific coached session or to read up on those issues a bit. Maybe
you already know what it is you need to do, but you need to commit to
do it this time.

Someone once said that “if you always do what you’ve always done,
you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” And it’s just as true when
it comes to your training – if not more so – as it is in any other
walk of life.

Well, it’s been a while since I last posted to this blog.

As you’ll see, I’ve migrated it from the Joomla site into a far cleaner (and more importantly, easier to use) WordPress Blog. And with any luck, this will mean I’ll post to it more often.

What a year 2008 has been to date & it’s far from over yet. But here are a few highlights…

January: Having launched the new website, visitors just kept coming, with the stats hitting the 1000′s very rapidly. The weather wasn’t anything special, but the volume of work I had to do meant that a cutback in training time for myself wasn’t that much of a hardship.

February: February continued in the same vein, but with the possibility of winning 220′s Coach of the Year always in view. As it turned out, I didn’t get invited to the dinner & took that to mean that I hadn’t featured – we went surfing instead! We also moved house, meaning that Will Newton Multisport Coaching now operates out of a bigger & more comfortable office.

March: The first TrainingTrips Warm Weather Training Camp at Club La Santa in Lanzarote was a welcome break from the atrocious weather we’d been having in the UK and was far better attended than we’d expected when we’d decided to fill the gap left by Joe Beer’s decision to work on the Club La Santa version a month earlier. A good time was had by all & for me, it was made all the better when Anita pointed out that I’d got second place in the aforementioned 220 Magazine Coach of the Year Award – clearly I wasn’t on 220′s party list, so no invitation to the ceremony.

April: Traditionally a month for rain, the weather was better & I even got some training in, but the knee injury that had bugged me all winter was still in evidence & I had to make the difficult decision not to race at Ironman Austria in July – there really is no point just making up the numbers anymore. My friend Ian impressed us all by completing his eight marathons in eight days in the very few days when it did rain – mud, mud, glorious mud! Well done mate!

May: The traditional early season events saw the sort of weather that was to characterise the summer – rainy & cold. Loads of triathlon events were turned into duathlons, aquathlons etc for the safety of the competitors. Little did we know this was what we were to have for the second summer in a row.

June/ July: The month started with our Worlds competitors heading out to Vancouver. And if we thought the weather here was poor, what was waiting in North America was even worse. Most of the female competitors got to do a triathlon, but for the boys it was yet another duathlon – very disappointing for those who’d been working on their swimming all winter. June also brings the first of the Ironman races, with all my clients performing brilliantly throughout the summer.

August: August saw the first UK Double Iron race & a special mention must go to Carl, who toughed it out to finish despite severely swollen legs to finish somewhere around 35 hours. Respect!

Thanks to Graham for forwarding the course details for Vancouver to me.

After a bit of fiddling about, I have as best I can, added this to mapmyride.com in order to get an idea of the course profile. And here it is…

Vancouver Bike Route

You’ll need to click on “Show Elevation” to view the altitude profile.

It’s described in the official course details as “4 laps of 10km – Hilly, technical.” Well, at 62m of climbing (unless I read the very dark map incorrectly) on each lap, I wouldn’t really call it hilly. However, as to how technical it is, there’s no way of knowing.

So, if you’ve been there & ridden it, we’d love you to let us know…

The full course information is available in the client area.

The first thing I heard when I turned on the radio yesterday afternoon was that Marion Jones had been stripped of the 5 Olympic medals she won in 2000 after she admitted steriods during her training.

Now I know that almost no regular reader of this blog is likely to be sprinter – although I do coach a number of very talented track & field athletes in a Plymouth school – but it still brought back the memories of all the scandals of the last few years across many of the endurance sport disciplines.

And as a fan, I’m disappointed. But I also understand that for many of these athletes, it’s more a case of “keeping up so they can keep their jobs” and “making a living.” However I don’t believe we can condone what is, simply put, cheating.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution  any more than the powers that be seem to have one. In the end it will always be up to the individual athlete. Strange how for many, the strain of hiding what they had to do in order to win gets to be too much in the end!

As an age-group athlete however, I can do my bit to make sure the sport is clean by racing clean myself. And as a coach, I will never suggest a chemical solution to a problem that is almost always one that could be solved by working a little harder, recovering a little better or simply being willing to push a little more in races.

It’s my experience that athletes who train hard, eat properly and recover well often produce results that are way above their expectations. And all without any performance-enhancing substances, let alone illegal ones.

I know there will always be those athletes who are looking for the easy way to get a result. You have to ask however, based on the experiences of athletes who have confessed to doping of any kind, is it really the easy way?

It’s true that most of us will never win a world championship – there aren’t many world championships after all. And the pressures on elite athletes to perform are more than most of us can comprehend. But we can all work to get ever closer to our genetic ability. And here’s the good news: I’ve yet to meet the person who is so fast that they can’t go faster… just by training better.

Drugs…? I’ll stick to my coffee!