Monday, February 14, 2011

The Belated Review...

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Sorry I missed Friday.  My girlfriend was in town for the weekend, and I got distracted, since it was our early Valentine's Day weekend.  I did some scouting for new gear for this season, but I came home empty handed.  No worries though, as I am sure I will probably find some money to spend that I don't have this year (yay capitalism, yay materialism, yay deficit spending!).

Yeah workouts kinda did not happen since it was Valentine's Day weekend.  That does not happen too often nowadays that we are so far apart, and also since it was "spend time with your main squeeze holiday."  But I am ok with that.  As far as training is concerned, I have a 13 week training block leading up to the Peachtree International Triathlon on May 14th, 2011.  Between now and then I have the Publix Half Marathon in Atlanta (March 20th, about 5 weeks away).  After that then I have a 24 week training block till I hit Ironman Florida.  Everything is getting planned out quite nicely.  I am only doing a two week taper in my 13 week plan, so I have two extra build up weeks to help with the transition to the Ironman block of training.  At some point I will be completing either IM Augusta 70.3, Halfmax, or the new Half Rev3 in Anderson SC.  All of them happen the last week of September/First week of October, so that will be perfect to lead into tapering for IMFL. 

I am also working on tweaking with tapering, because I have been doing some new research and studying the training habits of a coach in Australia who has trained up swimmers, triathletes, runners, etc and put a lot of them on Olympic teams and some of them into Ironman World Championships.  Basically he craps all over periodization and tapering (not to get rid of tapering, you just don't need as much as you think you do).  I also got to listen to an hour and a half interview with him, and I totally drank the Kool-aid.  Why???  Because it made total sense.  We have been trained (in the age grouper macro view) to look at swim bike and run separately, and not to train for triathlons.  Sadly enough this guy has not written any books or training manuals, and short of paying money to fly to Australia and train with him in person, I will just have to soak up any articles/training logs/interviews that he has done and try to tailor more of my training towards his style.  Do I think I will become the next best athlete?  Hell no!  But I think he is onto something and anything I try is bound to improve my performance by some standard, so why not employ his methods.

Just some food for thought.  Swam today, total workout 1700M.  I am going to wait another week or two and then complete a swim test.  At that point I will begin timing my workouts.  Tomorrow is bike at 5:45am at LA Fitness, and then I will work, go to class, and about 9:15pm I will get out and then head over to the gym to get in 4-5 miles of running.  Good times :)  Hope all of you had a great weekend, and I hope that all of you were wished a Happy Valentine's Day by someone who thinks you are special (friend, family, significant other, pet, etc).

1 comment:

Molly said...

Sounds like a fun and busy year ahead!!1