513 Days in a Row
In an effort to stay focused and add consistency, especially in swimming, back at the end of September of 2007, I decided to train every day for at least 2000m swimming or 30:00 total. I managed almost 90 days in a row of swimming before having to end the streak due to holiday pool closures. I kept the overall streak alive, though, and since September 29, 2007, I have now gone 513 days in a row! I feel like training has an inertia component to it. Once you get going, it is easy to keep going, but once you start taking days completely off, it can be a lot easier to slip off into complacency. For someone that is really focused and training full time, I think complete rest days can still be good. However, with a full time job on top of almost full time training, 30 minutes a day is something easy enough to commit to, and most days I do a lot more.
In fact, I just finished up one of my largest base building phases ever. Prior to this past week’s lighter training volumes, I managed 62 hours of training over the course of 21 days. In all, that consisted of 102,600m of swimming, 466 miles of biking, 87 miles of running, and 6:30 of strength training. It’s kind of funny that my 60+ miles of swimming volume is approaching my running volume, but I’m still really focused on improving my swim, and the run will come along as long as I stay healthy. After putting in 20+ hour training weeks, the 10 or so hours I did this week felt really, really easy.
That’s a good thing, as it means I’m recovered and ready to begin some more race specific training. The next four weeks the plan is to do 2 two week cycles. I have 4 key workouts in swimming, biking, and running and 4-6 strength training workouts in each of those two week cycles. I’ll drop my swim volume down to 28-30km per week, bike volume to 6-7 hours, and run volume to 3:20-4:00. I’ll keep the number of reps in the key workouts smaller to begin with to see how my body responds. After 4 weeks, I’ll take a recovery week, and use the information I’ve obtained to plan training loads leading up to my key race in May in Oklahoma City.
The only race I plan on doing before the Pan American Championships in Oklahoma is Stanford’s Treeathlon in 2 weeks. It’s a sprint race, and it should be nice to get a feel for racing again. I’ve come in 2nd overall two out of the three times I’ve raced, so hopefully I’ll win this year!
Filed under: Training
