Tri club collectively designed training plans for the 2010 season this evening. While mine has generally been designed, it is not complete. I have a good idea regarding foci for the different seasons and for periodization through until the end of April I’m sticking with the triathlon club’s regime. This is completely a matter of convenience, as it allows me to push it when my friends are pushing it and take it easy when they’re taking it easy. I also don’t have to pretend to coach one kind of workout while I do a different one myself, which is just a silly idea. In any case, as I have moved into my first base weeks of the year and am slowly working on continuing to develop the training plan to beat all others. Being that season of the year, the whole world seems to be discussing this stuff, lots of it is crap. It’s hard to sift the free insight from the for-sale products, but I did run across a good suggestion from Joe Friel. It follows.

Stolen Sourced from Joe Friel’s website:

Success in sport is just like success in any other aspect of your life. One of the requirements is careful planning. Deciding where you want to go in the future begins with knowing where you have been in the past. Recognizing trends and evaluating what you’ve been doing are both important steps on the path to racing better next year. This process can be accomplished in several ways. Talking with your coach or a trusted training partner is probably the best way. But lacking such people in your sporting life you can still accomplish the same end by answering some key questions. Here are some I often use. Your answers can lead in many different directions. Ultimately, the reason for such an exercise is to give you more focus when it comes to training and racing. It may even help you to decide why it is you devote so much of your life to training.

Here are five questions to answer at the end of your race season and before starting to prepare for the coming season:

1. What was the high point of your season? Why does this stand out for you? Was it what you thought it would be at the start of the season?

Quite clearly the highseason of the season was the month of June. While it culminated with me winning the Chinook Half triathlon near the end fo the month I trained excellently in the previous weeks and felt like I was very successful at many workouts. I was swimming faster than I thought I was able to be swimming at many workouts. My run pace was quick, despite not having a huge run volume in the previous couple months, and I was logging very impressive bike rides without getting as fatigued as I possibly should have been. I was racing well at the Tuesday night mountain bike races (threshold efforts), won a time-trial and managed a solid 200kms on my bike towing a trailer into a headwind at the end of a solid 4 day training block. I entered what I thought was a test-taper, but tapered well, hitting workout intensity accurately and cutting weight. On race morning I felt like I had eliminated fatigue but hadn’t recouped freshness, indicating I hadn’t over rested. I spent time during race week getting mentally prepared for race day and I then nailed the race, overcame the race day obstacles of a killer headwind, cramps and hot temperatures on the run. Ultimately I surpassed expectations and put together a race to be proud of.

This period of my season was supposed to be my buildup towards race fitness. I hoped to peak at the end of July, having added cycling prowess first and running speed second during the period of coming to maximal fitness for Calgary 70.3. It doesn’t surprise me at all that I was fast on the bike at this point in the season because I had hoped to be reaching my cycling peak earlier in the year but in retrospect I was impressed at how fast I was able to run at Chinook Half. At the time I thought I was primed to be adding some serious run speed to my fitness portfolio in the next six weeks and hoped to cut my half marathon time by ~8 minutes for the next race.

2. What was your greatest disappointment? Why did this happen? Is there anything you could have done to have avoided it?

The disappointing aspect of the season was my inability to get any faster at running during the month of July. I felt like I had designed a program for myself that was aimed at working on my limiters. I completed exactly the workouts I wanted to complete for three consecutive weeks of my run program. In retrospect I had misidentified what was holding me back from running faster. I was convinced that it was durability in my muscles that I needed to improve after suffering cramps at Chinook Half. I felt like what I needed to run fast was the ability to run tough. Knowing that my goal of running ~1:32 for the half marathon at the end of the 70.3 did not actually amount to running fast I was certain that I would be alright without doing much fast running. The issue was that running 1:32 although not fast, was faster than I had run a standalone half-marathon (Maybe I could have, maybe I couldn’t have, I hadn’t tried). In retrospect I was focusing on extending my ability to run longer along my current speed potential curve than I was at improving my speed potential curve.

Quick note -A speed potential curve is the curve you get if you try predict other distance race performances from a single distance race performance (or a couple performances) and plot them on a graph: Depending on your method you’ll likely get a curve – try it. If your curve is a straight line it means your prediction method is bogus, it should curve. If your body listened to what you drew on paper, the best strategy would be to get awful fast at 400 yard sprints you’ll be able to draw a better curve, and you’d in theory be a great marathoner. That theory would be a bad theory. In general though, your ability to run fast at 5kms should translate to run fast at 21.1 kms with the caveat that you run with sufficient weekly volume. Extending the longest distance you can run on your speed potential curve requires doing tougher long runs and long volume. Shifting your speed potential curve towards faster running requires doing those shorter and faster runs. A balanced approach to training sees you do some of each, but at any one point in time it may be most appropriate to focus on one or the other.

Whether or not I could have improved my run speed during July with a different run training focus might not be the only question. I spent July rather tired in comparison to May and June, I felt on occasion that I was trying to stick it out until August and then I’d get a break. That feeling I don’t believe was a symptom of my choice of training focus, it was more likely a symptom of where I was in my season as a whole. I think it’s pretty clear looking back that I had come to a rather sharp peak in my season at this point in time. Cutting weight going into Chinook half was a dumb idea, it likely extended my recovery from the race as well as made July tougher on me than it should have. I was trying to do some of my hardest training when I was already in my best shape. This is something Chris McCormack has talked about on and off, but I haven’t actually read much on the topic from people in exercise physiology. Not because I haven’t tried. I imagine these sorts of things would be terribly difficult to study, there are a million variables and unfortunately (for the researchers) one of the largest is probably motivation. Chris McCormack is also a big guy and his comments went like this, paraphrased of course because I have no idea where to begin looking for a direct quote: I often came into Roth [Late July] very light, and then tried to do my kona training while in excellent shape. That didn’t work because I had nothing left to improve as I built towards Kona. I learned that if I went into Roth feeling a bit flabby and out of shape I could still race well, maybe I’d have a hard time running sub 2:50, but it meant that when I started my Kona block I had a little bit extra to give. I’d come into Kona feeling fast and light and that’s what counts. endquote

Cutting 7 lbs during my taper into that race was also not the reason I stagnated in improvement at that point in my season. It’s quite possible that I was just extending my season for too long. Late February and early March had seen some of my biggest weeks ever in terms of dedicated training as I put together a key block of building towards the Yakima River Canyon Marathon. I had taken the shortest break possible after my marathon before getting back to training, everyone’s talk of how much time it takes to recover from a marathon had seemed like a challenge to me: how fast can I recover and get back to putting in big weeks? What that meant was, that I had tied the early season run focus directly into my summer triathlon focus. Taking minimal break probably made me run faster at my mid-season race but cost me the ability to keep building fitness into my end of season race.

3. Looking back, do you think you trained as wisely and as hard as you could have trained?

Without re-hashing the wise-ness of all my decisions relating to my disappointment in ability to continue running improvement through July I’ll comment on training “Hard” through the different months. I felt like I trained extremely hard during March. I was putting together a tough run program while at the same time coaching a tough bike program which I participated in with the triathlon club. March’s goal was to build muscular endurance on the bike and it meant for some hard sessions, combined with running longer than I had ever run before and with more volume than I had ever run before this made for a tough month. My swim frequency suffered as a result. March needed to be a hard month, and thus it was, I wouldn’t say it was too hard though. April was a fun month, I was reaping the benefits of a tough March (fitness wise) and was hitting key workouts hard and reveling the ability to finally get outside in good weather. At the time I didn’t feel like I was close to any limits of my ability to train but I was probably training too hard, not taking as long a break after the marathon as I maybe should have makes this month count as a net “too hard“. I backed off a bit in May from the aggressiveness of training in April knowing that I didn’t need to get too fast too soon. This probably saved me totally crashing in July, probably perfect execution this month. June I hit hard, no questions asked and July I probably tried too hard again! During July especially I was accumulating too much fatigue during the week for me to recover during easy sessions. I was replacing days completely off with easy swims or easy bike rides when I probably should have taken complete rests. Then I raced Calgary 70.3 and the triathlon season came to a close, of the 5 previous months I had netted too hard twice but never too easy, is there any secret I didn’t feel like I could perform my best?

Early August was a complete break and that was great, I didn’t want to train and I hardly did for two weeks. I then followed that up with a super challenging bike trip at the end of the month (Too hard – but that was exactly the idea) and tried to ease into Cyclocross season. I was successful at easing into Cyclocross season as I improved significantly through the course of the season fitness-wise, not just skill wise. It probably took a while for me to reap the benefits of that big bike trip but once I did my TT strength was definitely there. It took until the Blow Street Cross race before I put together my best race of the ‘cross season. Had I not gone down with piggy-flu I might have peaked for provincials, who knows. I’m confident I structured the intensity of training properly following my break in August.

4. What is the one thing you most need to work on for next season in order to perform better?

The race by which 2010 will be measured is Ironman Canada. That’s a fact that I can’t avoid, so while I’d like to take a good run at a few road races, maybe upgrade to Cat3, hammer hard at two half ironman races I have planned, set some PRs at the spring cross country race series and an early season half marathon, stick with the racing-pack at the Tuesday night social mountain bike races, and maybe place top 50 at the national TT championship, it is necessary to make the metrics for 2010 performance relate to Ironman Canada.

Of secondary importance on that day, I need to do quite a bit of work swimming to make that swim reasonably comfortable. To me, that requires technique improvement and swimming endurance. That is only going to be solved by bumping up my swim volume and continuing to accept feedback in the pool. This is currently why my shoulders ache from swimgame, it’s going to be a comfy 2.4 miles on race morning.

Primary importance on race day however, is my ability to run home with a good marathon. It needs to improve significantly from where I’m at right now. Based on my experience this summer I felt that once I was into the triathlon season my speed was capped. I could bump up endurance and my ability to run off the bike, and even my ability to run hills under control improved this summer, but my speed did not. I need to bring myself to a new level of running speed during the off season so that once the triathlon season gets going in full force next spring (when weekends start to be taken up by long bike rides and weekly volume gets stupid large) I don’t find myself trapped at running one pace and stagnate through the season. I need to have the capacity (base fitness, coordination, power, efficiency, pacing skills) for a far faster marathon than I have at the moment if I have hopes of running ~7:3X miles along Skaha. That will come with doing threshold run work in the off season allowing me to build into longer endurance runs when it counts next summer. For those 15-20 milers to wind up being fast, I need to start out with faster short runs in the early season.

5. What would you most like to accomplish next season? Is it a good stretch and yet within your reach if you do things right?

I will run the entire marathon at Ironman Canada August 29, 2010.