Today after a hard 30k Sunday run with the posse we all showered (Well covered ourselves in very cold water at the local surf club) before breakfast at Clancys Cafe for what we consider the best buttermilk pancakes in the Southern Hemisphere. (You would have seen a few images of these bad boys over the last few months so I won’t bore you with any more but today was a particularly good day for pancakes.)  Anyway imagine our surprise when the T-train turns up wearing a triathlon top, it pains me to even type  those words. I had attached an image of the sight I had to endure while I went one on one with Clancy’s best.

Now we all know the T-train ran the Bussleton half-iron man earlier this year (though we never talk about it.) as he was recovering from a nasty case of Plantar Fasciitis that he picked up in the Bunbury 50k race in 2015. Before this event I think Tony had entered just about every marathon or Ultra in WA (and placed or won most of them) for the previous couple of years. In the Bunbury 50k he was running well but had to DNF because of the injury. Now as we all know a bad case of Plantar Fasciitis stays with you a long time and is a real bugger of an injury. Every morning you wake up and hobble around like a 90 year old before it eventually (if you are lucky) calms down enough so you can continue with the day and even go for a run. Tony realised the only way to get over this injury was less running but he was keen to keep up his fitness so turned to the dark side, yep, he brought a bike and a pair of ‘budgie smugglers’. (Speedos to the non-Australian amongst us.)

For the rest of the year he would still run with us on Sunday but when we scuttled off to the Dome (Our restaurant of choice for the that period of the year as Michael Barton insisted we eat there so he could get his coffee card stamped. The things we do for each other as runners.) Tony would don his wetsuit (and thus save us from the view of him in his budgies pre-pancakes, thanks Tony.) and go for a ‘swim‘. You’ll notice I have put the word swim in italics, there is a reason for that. The T-train is a good runner but a very, very bad swimmer. One Sunday on the way to the Dome, to help Michael get a free coffee, we stopped and watched Tony swim. To this day I swear we watched him for at least 5 minutes and he didn’t actually move forward. He swims like a brick attached to another brick, and neither brick ever had swimming lessons. You’re getting the picture right. Luckily his riding was better and I feel towards the end of his training he was a half decent cyclist, still a good runner but as for swimming, he was still ‘challenged‘.

Tony did well at the half iron-man but the most important aspect of this little experiment was his overall general cardio fitness was certainly improved. He was looking a lot leaner and lost that puppy fat he was still holding onto. (albeit in his late forties!) To this end he was able to enter the race that broke him a year later and actually win it ! It had taken a year , a new bike and a pair of budgie smugglers but the T-train was back and better than ever. He then turned in a stellar year winning more ultras and placing in many more. He kept up the cycling but his swimming was sacrificed when I feel his Wife started to get concerned for his safety and insisted he only swam in water depots he could put his feet down if he got in trouble. (That was a joke by the way.)

So the point of this post is the T-train did what so many runners find difficult to do. He realised he was running too much, this had caused an injury which required rest but needed to keep up his fitness. He decided to cross-train. Being the competitive little bugger he is he also gave himself a goal and trained for a half iron-man. Luckily we didn’t lose him to the dark side and once his injury was cured, and the bike and smugglers put away, he was back 100% into running and had actually improved. Cross training it seems can be a good alternative to running or even a partner.

I must admit to cycling a few months of the year when it gets too hot to run twice a day. I run early morning and then commute to work by bike before returning home in the afternoon,  normally on a longer route. I’ve even been known to sip the odd cappuccino in lycra but that’s our secret.  When I cycle I make sure I go hard (no peloton free wheeling for me!) and also keep up a high cadence, avoiding the high gears as I’m not interested in those cycling muscles these gears encourage. As a runner a bike is a cross training piece of equipment that allows us runners to raise the heart rate and keep the general cardio fitness levels high enough so, if we have been forced to the bike by injury, when we return to running we haven’t slipped backwards too far, cardio wise.

As well as cycling there is swimming which is another great non-impact workout, and you get to wear budgie smugglers if you are under forty. Over forty the rule is board shorts in Australia and no one can ever wear budgie smugglers if you cannot see a beach.  Other good cardio workouts are circuit classes, yoga, pilates (great for the core and so neglected by all runners) and any exercise routine that gets the heart rate higher. Just make sure it’s high repetition, low weights, remember muscle weighs more than fat so we don’t want too much muscle, much to my Wife’s disgust.

So is cross training as useful as cross dressing for runners ? On the evidence of the T-trains swimming I feel he’d be better of cross dressing but overall his 6 months of cross training was a success and he returned to running a better machine than when he left. I’m actually quite looking forward to getting the bike out in a few months and I may even treat myself to a new set of lycra, just got to make sure my Wife doesn’t catch me as in her view middle aged men in lycra is worse than cross dressing. Each to their own….