It's time!

It's September 26th now and I've done all of 1 bike ride, 3 runs, and 1 swim in a short, 20 yd pool since IM Louisville about 4 weeks ago. I'd say that consists of a pretty break. And for the last week, I was in Tahoe with my in-laws where I ate lots of ice cream, cookies, pizza, whatever I wanted! I slept in (well as much as you can with a 3-year-old and a 1.5-year-old). I only went on a few easy runs with my wife and that was about it. Some good quality family time.





Now it's time to get back at it. I've had a couple of meetings with Coach and come up with some good plans for this off-season. I suppose it's the paradox of triathlon, but the working theory is that to come up with a good run in an IM, I need to become a much better swimmer and biker. Relentless focus on my weaknesses. Even though I did much better in L'ville than I did in Wisconsin in the swim and on the bike from an AG perspective, I still need to have more legs when I get off the bike.

So the plan will be to spend the next 3-4 months hitting the pool hard. I will also do a bike power focus for the next few months with multiple hard rides a week and lots of hill work. In the pool, I am going to shoot for minimum 5 swims a week, with 6-8 preferred. I'm going to try putting in some big volume in the pool and see what happens. I've made some good corrections to my stroke in the last year, so now I want to see how more volume will affect me. In this last year, I've done a max week of about 11K yards. If I can get >6 swims done in one week (with drills), I should be able to push 15K yards a week and maybe even get up to the 18-20K range. I am going to do this consistently as much as I can for the next couple of months. I am years behind the curve in swimming when compared to those that were competitive swimmers in their youth. I need to do some catching up or at least not let people get further ahead of me.

For the bike, I am going to do minimum 2-3 hard rides a week with one on the weekend including some hard hill work. Multiple swims a week are easier to schedule than long bike mileage, so I've got to have a quality bike focus as opposed to just huge volume, especially over the winter. It's just too hard to fit in >3 hour rides not on the weekend and I can usually only fit in one of those long rides on the weekend.

To track progress, I'm going to set up a benchmark ride with hard hill repeats and time myself on 2-3 repeats of all-out effort. I will track HR, power, and time and do this ride every 3-4 weeks. I am going to do the same in the pool and start off this week with a 1000 yd TT, which I will repeat every 3-4 weeks for progress assessment.

I am looking forward to getting back to the daily grind.