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

Halloween Haunting 10k

Success. I was ambitiously wishing for a 35:00 10km today after running a 16:44 5km over thanksgiving. I missed that time (likely due to poor pacing) but I still managed a respectable 35:29. That put me in 9th overall, 1st AG. Additionally I was going for top 10 and 1st age group. Again, success.

I programmed my watch to carry me through the first 5km at just above 17:30 so I could negative split into my 35 minute goal. I ran through the first 1500m following the absolute leaders (who came in around 31 minutes). Despite my watch screaming at me to slow down I was finally running with people in a race and my brain stupidly took over. I let the lead 8 go and started running with 2 other guys. We traded leads through to nearly 4km holding about 3:25/km. Still too fast. At the first turn around (3.5kmish) I let them go to try and salvage my pace. The course was 2 loops of 5km so coming into the second lap I slowed right down and crossed at 17:30. Right on pace... sort of. The last 1.5km were at a much slower pace than I wanted so I told myself that was a little breather, a reward, and now I would have to hold a real pace. This was easier said than done as for the next 3km my watch would be screaming at me to speed up. At about 6km I had caught one of the guys who had passed me earlier. He told me he was finished, I told him he was not. However I would go on to beat him in the end. The next person up the road was quite far ahead so I set my sights on carrying myself to the turn around at a pace under 3:35/km. From there I was banking on adrenaline to put me back on track. What I wasn't expecting was the motivation to finish coming from a very fast female hunting me down. I think she ended up around 36. That really woke me up though. At the turn around I told myself I would find my 3:30 pace until 9km then I would dig deep and smang the last km. I spent most of my training doing kms. I can crush one, it's only one. However it was all slightly up hill. I thought I heard 10th behind me and I absolutely refused to be caught so I surged on every incline and held the pace to the next one. By the final turn I was flying however the clock reminded me of my pacing mistakes and seeing the clock counting up from 35:20 gave me all the reasons I needed to sprint for the finish. 10th was 4 seconds behind me and gaining. I made it.

Adam "2-weeks of rest and swimming" Fortais