Working out with Macca

Chris "Macca" McCormack is a well-known Ironman champion and for most triathletes you fall in the Macca camp or Craig "Crowie" Alexander camp.  These two men are pretty different in their approaches to racing and have always been viewed as nemesis in the sport. 

I fall in the Macca camp...I love the confidence that Macca brings into everything he does.  He is quite the character and very accomplished as an athlete.  As an athlete, I appreciate all the hard work and effort he puts into training.  Here are some of Macca's achievements from his website:

Won 76% of career events.

Finished on the podium 88% of the time.

Won 200+ races around the world since 1993.

Only person ever to be Olympic Course + Ironman World Champion.

12 Ironman Victories, more than any other male.

Broken 8 hours in Ironman distances 4 times (Only man to break it more than twice)

Five-time International Triathlete of the Year.

Four-time Competitor of the Year.

ESPN World’s Fittest Man.

A few weeks ago, I noticed Macca tweeting and Facebooking about #MXvip and #MX12.  I dug into it and discovered that Macca has developed and released a series of training videos for his fans.  Tonight I needed to fit in a workout for my Holiday Bootie Buster Challenge points for the day.  I decided it was time to get my bike out and on the trainer for the winter season. 

My poor bike has sat unloved and untouched since August.  She is in desperate need of a tune-up but instead of doing that back in August I just let her sit.  Don't worry...I'll make sure to show her some love when my favorite mechanic is back in town over the holidays!  But for now she is back in use and happy on the trainer!

I went to Macca's website and discovered that he was offering a free trial of 3 of the workouts.  I signed up to try out the first workout which was called Over/Unders.  The trial video is not a complete workout...it's just a brief video of about 8 minutes that samples the full length video. 

The workout was set up as 3 sets of intervals.  The intervals were 4 sets of 2 minutes each and within each 2 minutes it was broken out as 40 seconds on and 80 seconds recovery.  I set up the intervals on TabataTimer.com to match the intervals that Macca laid out in the video.  I love using this website because it gives you verbal cues including some whistle blasts to let you know that the time is nearing the end on an interval.  I love hearing those whistles and the announcer say rest! I simply set up my work and rest times, then selected 4 cycles and 3 tabatas total. 

Since this was my first bike trainer workout in a while I kept my resistance at a low level especially during the rest periods.  I added a longer warm up and cool down to the set and ended up with a 50 minute workout.  My sprints were not near my normal capability and this will be something that I'll watch over the coming weeks as I rebuild my bike fitness. 

My initial review of the workout was that it was fun to hear advice from a world-class athlete. The timing of the trial video was off which surprised me at first.  Once I understood that the trial will only showcase how to do the workout it made more sense!  I will receive two more sample workouts in the coming weeks and will probably decide after the next one on whether to purchase or not.  The feedback that I have seen on Facebook and Twitter has been very positive about the videos.  I'm such a big fan that I am definitely leaning towards buying the series.  The series is less than $100 and comes with a 30 day money back guarantee plus instant access to the training videos.  Up next week to try out will be a run workout called Rolies Polies.