The other week I stumbled upon, and joined, the Ironman Lake Placid 2016 Group on Facebook. I figured what the heck, a little voyeurism might be fun, as I am always interested to see what others are doing. I wasn't sure what exactly to expect. Worse case I simply ignore it. What I did find has been interesting.
For those of you who might not know, IMLP is a July event, meaning we are 9 months from race day. If you have read any of my recent posts you know that I have been doing more exercise than training for more than a month now. Realistically, my only goal these days is to get in good enough shape to start training on January 4th without fear of injuring myself. The bar has not been set very high around these parts.
Back to the Facebook group. What I have found is an interesting group of people who appear to be training much different than I am right now. For example, On Sunday I saw a post from someone who did a 90 minute session on his bike trainer. This morning I read from more than one person who ran outside, pre-dawn, in the rain. And while I have no idea where the rain runners are located, for December I find that to be pretty darn hardcore and worthy of a Rule #7 shout out.
(For the record, it was raining and 38 degrees when I woke up this morning. I did workout. Inside. One of my long standing rules is I will not run outside in the rain in December when I am training for nothing. Running this time of year is purely for pleasure.)
For the past 8 weeks (and the next 5) I have been following what has become my fairly simple off-season bicycle protocol. I came to this about the time I started to get serious about triathlon based on two simple conclusions. First, I quickly recognized that being able to have a better than average bike split without over cooking the legs was one of the keys to putting up fast times. Our sport is swim/bike/run, not swimming and biking and running. Nobody gets a trophy for the best swim split or the fastest mile run. You get a trophy for crossing the finish line faster than the next guy.
The other conclusion I have come to is you cannot just go full throttle year round. On the bike I dial it back after my last triathlon of the season, then take a month or so of very little riding.
So here's how it has laid out on the back half of 2015:
October - My last "real" ride of the year was with the LWM Monday Night A-ride on September 28. I had planned on making it out to Kenny's last ride of the year the following week but work obligations kept that from being possible. The rest of the month consisted of five rides outside and a few short, easy spins on the trainer, mostly to just loosen up the legs. In a very real sense October was an off month.
November - The weather was warmer than normal this year allowing me to get outside to ride every weekend. The longest ride was 23 miles and I stayed on flat terrain and kept the heart rate low. Riding outside had more to do with enjoyment of being on two wheels not gaining fitness. What differed from October is the number of times I jumped on my trainer. After two weeks of almost no exercise at all, the final two weeks of the month saw me not only on the trainer, but actually putting in some work. A nice transition to what I have planned for December.
I have a number of go to workouts and decided to use the 10 x (1 min hard + 1 min recovery) as the perfect transitional workout to getting back into training again. Just enough work to feel like I did something, but not so much to kill my mojo. Best of all, with warm up and cool down the workouts were only 40 minutes long!!!
December - This month is really about getting some bike fitness back into my legs. Weekends will be spent outside (weather permitting) on either the road bike or the mountain bike with the simple goal of logging saddle time. One day a week - then eventually twice a week - I will get a short, high intensity session in on the trainer. The goal here is to start rebuilding my high end during the week as I regain some of my endurance base on the weekends.
Like I said, pretty simple but very different from what I have done in the past. After months of hard riding the body needs a break as does the mind. With early fall running races on my schedule I backed off the bike, riding for pleasure and recovery, before taking some real downtime from triathlon training. From there I am/will be slowly rebuilding bike fitness and strength in a way that keeps me from burning out or spending too many mind-numbing hours on the trainer.
Thanks for reading.
Train hard. Stay focused.
Jon
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