Lessons from The Three Little Pigs and Their Architecture

I like the fairy tale of the Three Little Pigs. Each of the swine built a house of specific resilience and integrity. So, when the Big Bad Wolf ‘huffed and puffed and blew the house’, he was testing the substance of each domicile and how well it met the criteria of testing. As we all know by now, the house made of bricks withstood the attempts of the hyperventilating canine. The brick and mortar house was more solid than the virtual houses made of straw and sticks.

The aforementioned fairy tale is analogous to endurance training. The house of bricks refers to building a strong foundation of base distance (lots of kilometres in the off-season). Long distance training helps build endurance, which is relevant when stepping up the intensity in later phases of pre-competition preparation. It is part of one’s periodisation which is critical for peaking on race-day.

Dropped like a brick is a term that means ‘to be overtaken and left in the wake’. Speed-demons delight in demoralizing lesser riders by first tagging along, and then breaking away from the pack. This is analogous to being dropped like a hot potato, where a girl ignores a guy after leading him on. However, I digress.

A training brick is a combination of two or more disciplines performed consecutively – with minimal rest. Thus, you do a swim/ride, swim/run and ride/run bricks. Hui Koon and I did a ride/run brick yesterday and scored a PB in training. He describes it clearly on his blog. Congrats on your PB, mate!

At the end of my brick session, I pedaled off to the lagoon food-centre for my usual nutritional punch of coconut juice – this is the official drink of marooned members of the television series Survivor. In the past, Asians believe that coconut juice and water convolvulus (kangkung) may lead to weakened legs. Perhaps this is an Old Wives’ Tale, as sports nutritionists amplify the relevance of coconut juice as having loads of water and electrolytes including potassium, sodium  and some magnesium (thus, used as an emergency intravenous fluid). So far, my personal experiment with the coconut (not a true nut) had not compromised my heavily used legs. My biking legs are building up well. My new Elite Razor Tri frame will arrive early next week, and I am now designing the configuration of my final racehorse. Stay tuned!

Photo-credit: http://www.indrani.net/