Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Calgary 70.3 Recap

Two weeks ago I had the privilege to present to a room of 20 triathletes on the topic of "Establishing Your Training Plan For A Great Calgary 70.3 Experience". There were some great questions from the audience which showed they were engaged in my talk!

The following are some highlights of my presentation for those who have requested a summary;

GENERAL GUIDELINE: target an 8-12 week block of training comprised of approximately 10-12 hours/week of consistent training spread out across the week versus doing 70% or more on weekends.

Don't over think the Periodization plan with complicated bi-weekly totals but rather strive to perform training daily.

Identify opportunities to train that are not influenced too often by “life” to ensure a consistent weekly pattern and schedule these as your training days.

If there are specific days that you struggle to get in any training simply schedule them as rest days.

Training Periods

March 5th – May 27th: Consistent 10-12hours (+/- 2hours) per week primarily aerobic training.

May 28th – June 3rd: Planned recovery week.

June 4th – July 16th: Progressively bigger volume weeks 14-17hours (+/-2hours) per week with
more specific training at race pace/intensities.

July 17th – 28th: Taper period. Maintain the frequency and intensity of training sessions
but reduce the per session duration by 30-50%. Highly variable and
dependent upon the overall amount of training you have done.

Training Considerations

Identify the discipline you struggle with the most and address it early on in your training versus closer to the event.

Many people focus too much training time on the swim and neglect the bike and run more so.

Considering the swim takes roughly 11.6% of the overall race duration, the bike ~51% and the run ~36% (based on an average age grouper’s finish time), one can see that more time can be made up on the bike and run. Now if you don’t know how to swim then spending more time on it early season is a definite priority.

The bulk of one’s training should be comprised of aerobic training. It is highly valuable to get a fitness test done in order to help establish what your actual aerobic training zones are and ensure you are not working too hard all the time with either heart rate or power output and running paces. Knowing your numbers will enhance the use of the many training devices athletes possess.

Training too hard or too much which leads to excessive fatigue and therefore time off hinders the process. A balanced approach allows for this consistency and helps offset large pits of fatigue. This isn’t to suggest you avoid higher intensity training as it has a place in your program but shouldn’t be the mainstay of your training for long periods of time and must be utilized carefully.

Body Maintenance

Recovery is an important component of training and doesn’t always mean a day off. Active recovery sessions, massage, stretching, yoga, core and general strength training all help keep your body in tip top shape. Strength training should not however detract from your training but rather supplement it.

Listen to our body and understand the varying levels of fatigue caused by the training you do. Detect patterns or trends and know that life stress has a dramatic impact on your recovery and influences your performance.

Sleep is vital as it is the true time in which we regenerate our body. Make sure you get enough and don’t get in a pattern of sleeping less just to achieve weekly training targets.

Many people are under recovered versus over trained. Life stress can contribute to this in a dramatic way.