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

(Arguably) The hardest week

As this is essentially the final chance for a build week before I throw myself into A-race season, I'm trying to make the most of it. I abridged my recovery week from my last build period to three days, and threw myself into some hard training and a race prior to this week. Since, I've been up to:

Monday
BIKE - 100min - 2x20min ftp w/ 10 min recovery, long cool down
SWIM - 60min - 50-100-150-200-250-250-200-150-100-50 on 50sec/50 (in on 45sec/50)

The biking was miserable, I had to wear winter clothes and not to mention very tough after my 10k the day before, but I pushed through and hit my power numbers. I felt sluggish and crappy during my swim warm up, but found once I started the real workout I was hitting my paces. It was a good tough workout, but I got through it!

Tuesday
BRICK - 60min - 5km bike - 2.7km run - 5km bike - 1km run - 5km bike - 1km run, all as fast as was reasonable, practicing transitions

I saw a post on slowtwitch, someone was asking the relevance or usefulness of multiple short brick intervals. My opinion is that they are useful to some extent for fitness, but much more so for working on T2 skills. So that's what I did. I didn't look at my power on the bike, but it ended up being around 270W or so... but the runs were about 3:20/km then 3:05 and 3:05. It was pretty tough, especially on tired legs but I got some quality running in and transition practice which were the goals of the workout. I managed to treat myself to a massage afterwards!

Wednesday
SWIM - 50min - 300 tempo (in <4:30 -="" 1min="" 2x50="" 300="" 3x50="" 4x50="" 5:15="" in="" on="" p="" paddles="" pull="" tempo="">
Another swim workout I was happy with. I needed a rest from the run-bike stuff and this was good.

Thursday
BIKE - 3 hours, 10 min - Long, hard Sault Cycling Club ride

Pulls in the range of 300-400 Watts with a hill sprint half way through... then I finished out the night getting the distance up to 100km because that's a nice round number! My legs were completely toasted. I woke up in the middle of the night because my legs were so sore. I got some water and went back to sleep.

Friday
RUN - 45min - 4.5km @3:32/km - 1min rest - 2.7km @3:32/km - 30 seconds - 1km in 3:27

I was very tired today and not highly motivated... but I guess I must have been because I got out and I did it, and I did it well. Recovery tonight? The movie Identity Theft. Terrible. So bad. Possibly the worst movie ever made. I can't believe how bad.

The rest of the week? I am going to try and get into the open water. I need to try out this wetsuit! I've been hunting for good places. I'm going to do another easier ride on Sunday I think, and a bit of easier running tomorrow. I need a bit of a recovery.

Good talk.

Really though. Identity Theft is so bad it's making me feel physically ill.

Adam "Movie review blog" Fortais

Brief run-test debriefing

1) Eat appropriately prior to testing

     Eggs, bacon, cheese and coffee do not provide your body with the proper nutrients to keep from   crashing with low blood sugar

2) Take some time off before testing

      1-2 days isn't a very long time after 3 weeks of the highest volume of your life. Consider testing at the end of the week

3) Watch your heart rate

      Don't be surprised if you crack after 6 minutes above 195 bpm. Especially if last test you maxed out at 195.

4) Know when to pack it in

      If you notice your test has been a perfect storm of failure, don't be afraid to call it quits early. You can always retest later in the week.


So all of these things just happened. The test was a 5km TT. I held my goal pace for about 13 minutes before cracking. The speed didn't feel too bad, just everything else wasn't firing today. I called it quits around 4km and plan on retrying later this week. Before quitting I was holding 3:20min/km which seemed completely reasonable. The first couple km were no problem at all. I will be shooting for that again later.


Adam "Keep that frown concave down!" Fortais