I love it when a plan comes together...

I had another meeting with my "coach" yesterday. It's sort of a weird concept that I have a coach now, but I'm really excited about it! Based on our initial discussions, I think he will push me pretty good, which, if I want to keep getting faster, is good, especially with limited training time.

My mission for the next couple days is to do some time-trialing to get some benchmarks in place. Especially on the bike and in the pool. So this morning, I did one of my local loops from my house that is ~22 miles and has about 1900 feet of climbing. Except he wanted me to do it twice. Yup. So I got back to my house after the first 22 and turned right back around and did it again. And this was a hard effort; I was supposed to be going hard to establish a good baseline. I did the first loop in like 1:24 and the second in about 1:23 and change, so I've set my initial pass at this double loop at around 2:48. And the PowerTap had me at 200 watts average and 16.2 mph. A tad slower than I was doing this loop getting ready for Vineman. And oh boy, the legs are feeling it right now! Overall it was 45.6 miles with 3880 feet of climbing, so not an easy route by any means. The plan will be to do this about once a month at the beginning of the month to see how I'm progressing through the off-season and into next season.

In the meantime, coach will be putting together my detailed plans, which will include 3 weight sessions, 3-4 swims, and at least 2 quality bike workouts a week. The idea is to get stronger on the bike and get some more quality going in the pool. I may even have him do a video session in the water because I've never seen myself in the water and I think it would be fairly enlightening. Tomorrow, I'm going to do a 200 yd TT in the pool so he can establish my interval times and then I'll do a 1000 yd TT, probably the next day, to get a good baseline for the month.

I think the trick over these next couple of months is to develop some consistency, but I definitely don't want to get too crazy too fast... but the motivation is good right now so I plan on doing some good off-season work. The objective is to get to January/February of next year and be very confident that I'm in good shape and ready to go to another level. We shall see...