A Man with a Plan (or at least the start of one)

The Links section on the right side of this blog now has a link to my training plan. (Here it is as well.) Anyone incurably curious enough to take a look might be confused. No, it isn't really blank. It's just that the plan doesn't start until next January, so you have to skip past a bunch of empty months to see anything. The plan is based on Joe Friel's work, particularly from his latest book Your Best Triathlon. Friel claims that you can't really sustain a training plan longer than the 24 weeks (plus preparation) without burnout. That definitely matches my experience, and working backwards from the race date sets the start of official training.

So what happens between now and January? That's easy to say, but less easy to do: Lose weight. It seems like every year I end up having to get down to my racing weight while working through my training program. That means losing weight and building fitness simultaneously, and it's hard to do. Some years (2009) I've managed to pull it off, but others (2010) haven't worked out as well. The biggest conflicts occur on rest and recovery days: my training plan says "take it easy," but my diet says "burn some calories." I'm going to do my best to avoid that battle this time. And given the elevation profile of the bike course, power-to-weight ratio looks to be critical. My ideal racing weight is probably close to 135 pounds, and although I've never quite gotten that light in the past, it will be my big hairy audacious goal for this race. The scale this morning showed 153.7 pounds (which is already down from 173.7 pounds in early May). Reaching 135 pounds by the start of training means losing less than 2/3 of a pound per week, and that doesn't seem too impossible. All I really need is to develop a fatal allergy to chocolate chip cookies.

By the way, the training plan so far only maps out the macro and meso cycles. Eventually I'll add the details for each week.

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