Unstructured training and the "off-season"

Since completing the Toronto Triathlon Festival I have entered into a sort of off-season. For 5 days immediately following the race I don't think I did any training. I was planning on giving myself 7 full days, but I started itching to move around so I cheated. Until August 17th I will be in a strange phase of preparing for a local race while still being in off-season recovery mode. I know I will not be peak performing, I fully expect to lose some threshold ability. The goal is to maintain some general endurance and tweak up my higher end power and speed without too much stress on my body. This summer I have been focusing on upping my endurance from a sprint racing to olympic, so for this race I will be moving back down to the sprint distance. I will go into a bit more detail below.

As I've mentioned above, this year I've put a lot of effort into increasing my volume to make the transition from sprint to olympic distance racing. With that in mind I have put a premium on combining workouts to increase workout times, and in general just increasing duration. With this in mind, I should be able to carry a good amount of this new-found threshold endurance through to my next race. During the competitive season long, slow efforts took a backseat in order to get all the threshold quality I wanted in, so these will be making a return for the next little bit.

In order to drastically increase my muscular endurance work this season I have had to reduce intensity compared to my previous years. I went a little overboard and almost completely wiped out VO2Max intervals from my training, especially in cycling. In this next block I will be focusing much more on these high power, low duration intervals. These intervals can be very strenuous, especially in what I would call my off-season, so I am attacking these workouts in a fairly unstructured way. I am either doing them in a fartlek style workout, or I am going out with no goal number of intervals to complete and calling it a day when I think I've had enough or the quality starts to drop. Always making sure there's at least one more in the tank.

Since this is still an off-season, workouts come on an as-desired basis. I'm finding I require at least some physical activity every day or else I'm not really nice to be around, so this isn't a huge detriment to staying fit. Additionally, hard days are unplanned. If I go out for a run and feel great, I will take this as an opportunity to get some quality in. If not, I'll ride it out a little bit and stay out for the endurance. If it's still no good, I'll call it a day. Case in point - I was planning on cruising around on my friend's bike this afternoon but it started raining. I don't really want to get wet, and I certainly don't want to ride the trainer so I am writing this post.

Finally, I'm doing things in training I wouldn't normally do. This morning at the pool my main set was 5x200m IM. I never do IM. However, I do believe being proficient in all the strokes is probably a good idea so why not now? I polished it off with a couple 50's of sprinting. It was a hard workout! But not hard in the way I'm used to. It was refreshing.

The off-season doesn't have to be boring, and you don't have to get fat and lazy. It just has to be different. Don't let the lack of structure be stressful.

Adam "Have fun, go fast" Fortais

Getting nervous...

One week to go before AG Nationals in Toronto. I'm trying to peak right now and I'm getting a little worried. I gave myself 2.5 weeks to peak... The first week off I felt pretty good, but lately I've been feeling like garbage. This morning I went for a short 8km run. At 4km I decided I wanted to touch race pace for about 5 minutes, for fun mostly... I don't know if I was dehydrated, tired, or what but I started getting a little dizzy and well, it just wasn't there. I shuffled home.

From the end of my bike block onwards my riding has seemed to have gotten worse as well. I'm just not putting out the power. I haven't lost any weight, but it's just not there.

I've been more tired than usual over the last little bit as well. And very irritable. Muscles aching in ways they hadn't before.

I shouldn't be "testing" myself during these 2-3 weeks, and especially not now. I just have to trust all engines will come back and be firing better than ever by next Sunday.

To reassure myself I've been reading articles.

http://www.triathlontrainingarticles.com/Taper.html

This sounds familiar. I'm not doing Ironman-type volume, so hopefully my progression will be a bit quicker. I think I'll just go for an easy swim tomorrow.

Adam "Taper" Fortais

Post-race bike block

After a fairly dismal, but adequate race at Muskoka, I targeted my bike as the weakest link. Unfortunate since I thought I was a fab biker... but more-so because it's ~50% of the race. Something needs to be done.

First thing was first. Could I find any free speed anywhere? I checked my position... this dude's got the flattest back in the West. I thought about what I did with my head... I keep it low and out of the way. I don't have an aero helmet... but are those really that important? Seriously. I don't know. I recently purchased a wheel cover. I can't afford new wheels. I've moved my bottle between my arms on my bars and got rid of superfluous bottle cages. I've made a tiny flat-pack, wrapped it up ultra-small and zip-tied it under my saddle. Super out-of-the-way. I think I've optimized that side of things...

But still! I'm somewhere under 160lbs, have a nice, well-fit TT bike... and yet, even 290W doesn't get me going 40km/hr. I don't know what to do. Maybe I am "cursed" with a wide body. Maybe my practically concave-chest acts as a sail. I don't know. All I can think to do is train harder.

With that in mind, cue bike "crash" block. Probably not the greatest name considering the sport... Never the less, I went for a very easy ride the Monday after the race and started from there. I road every day for 11 days (if one includes race-day as part of this week (who wouldn't)). I reduced my swimming and running during this phase, but did not eliminate them. Here is the breakdown:

Monday: 1 hour bike, easy

Tuesday: 10min @ 250W, 5min @ 300W, 10min @ 250W, 5min @ 300W -- 7:30 rest -- 20min @ 280W INTO 10 min moderate tempo run

Wednesday: 45min easy ride
                    9x200m swimming, various pull/paddles/swim, 1500m TT pace

Thursday: INDOOR - 15min @ 280W -- rest -- 3x2:30 >320W w/2:30 rest
(Deceptively hard. Holding 280W for 15min did not feel particularly easy as it probably should have been.)

Friday: 40min @ 280W -- 3-4 min rest -- 2:30 > 320W INTO 5km up-tempo run (17:46)
           Later that night, 30 minutes easy running to shake the legs out a bit

Saturday: various HARD hill repeats. Anaerobic stuff for sure. 4x 3ish minute intervals. Finish it off with a little bit of threshold time.

Sunday: 40 minutes of moderate-hard fartlek running. Mostly moderate to be honest.
             70 minutes easy riding

Monday: 20min @ 285W -- 10min rest -- 15min @ 285W -- 7:30min rest -- 10min @ 285W -- 5min rest -- 5min @ 285W
               Later, 20min tempo run, 5ish mins rest, 1km fast

Tuesday: 50 min easy ride
               10x200m swim intervals at around 1500m TT pace, 15 seconds rest between

Wednesday: 20km TT, all out. Power plumeted in the second half of the trial, only could average about 270-ish Watts and 31:30. Very tired, legs destroyed.
                    2x1000m swimming, long, slow, fairly easy stuff, broken up a bit into various strokes

This lead me into my "peaking" phase. I'm prepping for the Toronto Triathlon Festival, which I have learned is AG Nationals this year. Better get it right this time. More on peaking later. After the race. As a bit of a teaser... I'm feeling like I'm recovering... nervous I'm detraining... and not really feeling like I'm getting fast yet. Perhaps this crash week was a little too much and I just need some time... Come Monday I go into "race week" meaning dedicated recovery, so maybe I'm right where I need to be. We shall see...

Adam "Too late to fix anything now" Fortais