Training in the clouds of Austrian Prealps and about the 80/20 Rule

Heat already crawls over fields and hills among animals farms, among the green-gold cornfields ... infinite beauty!

The Austrian Alpine foreland weather plays with us and makes us dizzy jumping from  0°C to 25 C. It is like our emotions are washing in the washing machine if you know what I mean.....
For about three days it doesn't raining anymore and the sky stays open, but partially covered providing a fascinating clouds spectacle.

The colors are dense, strong, deep ..... I am further moving inside the movie of my life or inside a life like a movie ..... adding a little red in the perfect combination the nature around me has to offer. Free of charge.
 I like here, it is a part of my dream actually. I miss the water somehow .... a river, a lake ... I have the Ybbs River actually and the lakes in Blindenmarkt where all triathletes from the region are training. Good training: 20 km cycling to Blindenmarkt, swimming and then cycling back :-)

I dream about a larger house with 2 guests rooms where people from all around the world can come and stay for training and coaching.

Our dreams change all the time and never ends .....
I already have plans and designs, I know exactly how the guests rooms will be, how the fitness room will be, how the terrace will be.

Not big, but large enough for my passion and for my business.
Because the Prealps Area is a very good area for training. 

You can run under the sun and in shadows, you have hills, you have off-road too, you have just a few cars driving around.

You can ride to the Ötscher Mountain, run off-road and ride back.

You can ride to Lunz am See and return doing a round-cycling-training for 120 km and thousand meters high difference.

The area has a lot of potential and I am happy to be here, although I still dreaming about the high mountains which I miss here. But it is another station on my way to them and I started to love the area.

I am close to the Calcareous Alps and to the Steiermark. 
In 3 hours driving I can reach Graz, another beautiful area and nice for training.
The air is fresh, the landscape is wonderful and you often get the feeling you are inside a piece of painting.
I love the clouds and the silence here. The distance to Salzburg is about the same as the distance to Vienna, so I am in the middle of two worlds of Austria (180 km to NW, 150 km to NE).

The grassland is from now on sprinkled with cows which are lazily hanging over all in this surreal painting in their own well defined style. A piece of ancestral makes you realize that we really could be much happier with less technology.

Yesterday I was running the last three km (from 12) on the main road. Very sunny, warm. Suddenly I saw on the left side of the road three large piles of colors stringing out: pink, white and another shade of pink. An unmistakable smell spread out from the small pink meadow in the center ....

And, as only our spirit and memories can do, I instantly was headed into worlds that I thought I have forgotten .... me in the Carpathian Mountains (Piatra Craiului) - Autumn 2013..... my soul has disappeared for a few minutes and left my body alone in Austria :-)

I let you further enjoying the pictures I took while I briefly talk about today's training session - arguments and goals.

There are two different opinions about how the endurance athletes should train:

*long and slowly (endurance gain) or

*shorter and faster (speed and power gain).

I have read the opinions of Matt Fitzgerald, Joe Friel, Jim Vance, Mike Schultz, Matt Dixon, Dr. Philip Maffetone, Mark Kleanthous and I continuously read everything I get!

The fact is that training concepts are changing over the years due to new perspectives and results after specific studies.

Another fact is that there are trainers who are coming with their own concepts and here you have to dig a little about their backgrounds.

If you are a triathlete or a cyclist or runner the idea to get a personal trainer coming from the body building area might be not the perfect idea for you. You should choose a trainer having a triathlon, running or cycling background.

You probably heard about the 80/20 Rule, right? Of course :-)

This Rule was discoverd by an American exercise scientist based in Norway, Stephen Seiler. He studied how elite endurance athletes really train and he found a remarkably consisten pattern: they did approx. 80% of their training at low intensity.

 It is widely assumed that the reason elite endurance athletes spend so much time at low intensity is that they must do so in order to sustain the extremely high training volumes they do. In other words, it is assumed that volume is primary and intensity secondary in the formula for optimal training. But the latest science indicates that the opposite is true.

If a "mostly-slow" approach to intensiy were necessary only to allow high-volume training, then recreational athletes training at lower volumes would fair better with an approach that leaned more on moderate and/or high intensity.

Indeed, many age-groupers believe they can "make up for" training less by training harder. But in a 2014 study, Seiler found that club runners who ran just 56 km (35 miles) per week on average improved their 10 K race times by twiche as much as runners who did half of their training at moderate intensity (which is typical of recreational runners).

So it appears that an 80/20 intensity balance is optimal for all endurance athletes. The optimal volume of training for each athlete is the amount of 80/20 training that yields the best results. Because low-intensity training is so gentle, this amount wil be relatively high for everyone, but higher for some than it is for others, and it will tend to increase for each athlete as he or she develops.

Here is a very simple example of a week of 80/20 triathlon training:

Read more information on Fitzgerald's Blog.

My actual goals in running trainig are: endurance in different conditions (weather, empty stomach - eat carbs in the evening, wake up in the morning, go training for no longer than 90 minutes, than have your breakfast! -, cadence, hills).
I run everyday for 60 up to 75 minutes without breakfast and without hydration between 10 and 15 km.
I moderate my speed on down hills.
I educate my cadence and the mid-foot style - high cadence it works on down hills, mid-foot style it works better on up hills -.