Up up and away!

The last two months have been a bit of an odd experience for me in training. It was kind of easy, and I was feeling like I was actually getting less fit and fast than before. That can be a disconcerting experience, especially when I'm imaging that to get to that elusive Kona slot one has to go very fast for a (hopefully not so) long time.

"What's going on?", I was thinking. "Shouldn't I be building the athlete of the next summer, working on my weaknesses? Am I not making mistakes in trundling along so easily" This is where Alan's guidance is coming in, which helped me change my perspective on how to train and what to change.

Last year I trained incredibly hard for Ironman France, to the extent that I was struggling to keep work, training, and life balanced and often felt on edge, sleeping badly. What had happened? After a great race in Clearwater in November of 2010, I took a couple of weeks off and jumped right back into training in December. My workload (TSS) was very high in January and February, actually almost as high as in the key months before the Ironman. February was a different story, with a two week trip to friends' weddings in Latin America. In March and April it was back to the menu of big training.

When I look at how I trained, it also becomes visible that I was training at relatively high levels of intensity. TSS per hour tells us the level of intensity, with 100 being at threshold (i.e. a 10km race run at full speed). I was doing my average training at about 65 TSS per hour, showing that I worked a lot in high intensities.
I have learned since that big athletes like me are much more at risk of burning out and getting injured when training intensively. So what to change?

Alan has really changed two things for me, and it takes time to accept them after a couple years of focusing on going fast and hard and a long period of time where I was pretty fit. The first thing is progressive load. We can see that September was my lowest month since November 2010. This was after Ironman Wales, with recovering from the season. But instead of jumping right back in, the workload is still pretty low and only rising a little each month. October was a bit bigger than November, December will be a big bigger than November, etc, until we get to Frankfurt in July. This means that fitness is much lower at this time of year, but will hopefully be higher when it matters, because I will be less tired and can really put the pedal down when I need to.

The second thing is a reduction in intensity. My fatigue curve and short numbers point to the fact that I am better on short distances than on long ones, so the task is to get my endurance to improve. Hence lower intensity training that helps build endurance, and less focus on building VO2max or threshold. Looking at the second graph, there is a drop in intensity from July/August of this year, when I started working with Alan. I expect to see a lot of endurance work with a bit of sharpening towards the key race (Frankfurt), but overall the training will be a bit slower than before. Patience will be of the order :-).