Saturday, October 16, 2010

Brief update- an early start to 2011

It finally happened.
After more than a year of playing around I've felt the itch.
The itch to get back into structured training, the feeling that something is out of place. That it's time to get back on the horse.

I resisted the itch for almost a month, until it was almost unbearable. I started dreaming about long runs, brick workouts and lung busting swim sets. A bit sick, right?
So here I am, 3 weeks into training and feeling pretty good.
This week saw me swim 7 sessions (30km), ran 4 (50km), an hour of spinning, and some dryland. I'm considering getting rid of my trainingpeaks account- the new system updates make my head hurt. My metrics may just as simply be added to a google doc.
The pool in PG has a bulkhead stuck at 40 meters. So I've been swimming intercourse for the last three weeks. All my sets are in multiples of 40, not 50m, which gives my brain something to calculate to see approximately how fast I am going. This involves multiplying my time by 1.25 to see what it actually would be if I was swimming long course.
About 11 months ago I dropped down 9kg from my 2009 racing weight, and have been sitting around 81kg for the last year. I would be happy with a new race weight of 75-77kg for 2011.
I haven't done any VO2, lactates or preliminary zone testing yet, (will wait till mid November to test) but feel like my numbers aren't bad considering I played a lot and trained very little in the last year. My long runs are already up to 20km, 2 hours without any hip or shin issues, and my feel for the water is coming back faster than I thought.

Right now, the next 12 months are looking like the following:

October - December: Swim hard, fast & strong. Full time swimmer's training schedule, race in December Ice Classic meet in Kamloops. Run 3-4x/week, 1 long run, 1 hill workout, 1 track intervals (600's-1.2km repeats), and 1 build workout/brick. Dryland/prehab up the wazoo and make sure there's not underlying deficiencies, weaknesses or compensations going on. Once cross country skiing starts, go have fun and get some vitamin D.

December 10-14ish day training camp- aerobic emphasis: Cross country ski, long swims, and runs (weather permitting). Start cycling during this time

January-March: transition out swim, start more spinning/bricks and cross country skiing. Consider swimming Western's

April: RAGE long distance tri- Vegas (take 5-10 days off after tri)

May-November: two 70.3 races, *this is a 7 month stint, so I'm sure there will be a lot going in here. For now I'm just thinking to April.

November: Ironman Arizona- race fast

Goals for 2011:
injury free
race weight of 75-77kg
top 3 finish in IM AZ 2011
run time at IM AZ < 3:30
swim time <50 minutes
1/2 marathon time 1:40 (RAGE tri)

More to come... this post was more of a personal unloading of 25 ideas going on in my head, than to try and update on what I'm doing.

Ps. Intercourse because it's not short course, but it's not long enough to be long course.