The Plan

November 26, 2006

It is always as good idea to set goals either:

• During the off-season (all 2 weeks of it) when I don’t remember the pain or
• December 31^st after too many tasty beverages.
  

I’ve found that both approaches usually lead to crappy decisions. However, since I tend to view triathlon as a fall-winter sport that is played in the spring-summer, I usually have a very clear idea about what I’m doing in the summer by November/December and can limit my bad decision making on December 31^st to subjects such as:

• Blue or red cocktails… which one to start with?
• The fondue is running low on fluid. I’m sure its fine to just pour more fondue fluid into the already lit burner. Mary didn’t really like that table cloth.
• One more martini? Why not?
• Anything that starts with “Hey, watch this!!”

Although my race plan looks suspiciously like the product of the volatile combination of alcohol and flaming blue fondue fluid, I assure you that I put it together the following strategy without the aid of any mind altering substances. Rather, I’ve just forgotten how much these things hurt:

• Double Ironman Quebec July 2007
• 100 mile trial run September 2007
• Ultraman Hawaii November 2007
• Deca Ironman June 2008 or Ten Ironman in Ten Days November 2008

Of course, I plan to compete in as many sprint and Olympic triathlons as I can and a half-ironman or two because I wise man once said that “racing teaches you courage”. I’m not sure how you can be “taught” courage. Maybe he wasn’t that wise.

I also plan to pace Mary in a marathon or two, hopefully to a Boston qualifying time. I should mention that I don’t want to qualify for Boston. I just want Mary to so I can go on the trip, watch, drink lots of Sam Adams, and have Mary drive the rental back to the hotel.

But wait, there’s more! I haven’t run any track for three years. I would like to have another crack at a fast 800m. This was what I ran in high school and university. I’m sure that the training is completely consistent with preparation for a deca. To be honest, I did my fastest double ironmans (if you can use “fast” and “double ironman” in the same sentence) after a winter of training for indoors masters 800m.

Given my current state of fitness, this seems pretty feakin’ ambitious. I’ve put on somewhere between 5 and 7 pounds since September. Any day now the Jerry Springer Show will be tearing down the side of my house to rescue the 145 pound morbidly obese shut-in. To paraphrase “Fat Bastard” in “Austin Powers”, “I eat because I’m unhappy and I’m unhappy because I eat.”

I kind of half committed myself to a 200km randonneur ride on November 4 thinking that this will provide some kind of motivation to keep some consistency in my fall training. Instead I found myself praying for either a blizzard or a broken collar bone to keep myself out of it. As it turns out, it was barely nice enough to ride, but I chickened out anyways.

I really dislike this time of the year. I find that getting back into a reasonable rhythm of training, sleep, work, and the rest of life to be very unsettling. I’ve had a few glimmers of hope: a number decent indoor trainer bike rides where the inter-play between cadence, heart rate, music, and the detachment (that only comes with being awake this early in the morning) did not have me longing to be someplace (anyplace) else. I’ve been on the track a few times for some real suffering and my last four Sunday long runs have been consistently at the three hour mark. Hell, I even swam a few times. All of this came to naught because I found myself in Vegas for work for a week. Darn. I’ll discuss my time in Sin City shortly.

I really need about a three week self-administered boot camp to jump start my fitness and force me to stop obsessing about my “bloated” state. ….but then I managed to fall into some contract work that just kept expanding in scope to the point that it will pay for most of the Hawaii trip including taking the family….maybe not all the pets but the human part of the family. All of this is moot; however, if Mary determines that this money can be better spent on luxuries like food, mortgage, and clothing. So, reaching new depths of depravity I will embark on my own personal boot camp while banging away on this latest contract, working my real job, and doing all that other “living” stuff. Sleep is for wimps.

Anywho, this is week one of post-Vegas boot camp and it should set the tone for the rest of the winter.

Monday: Bike indoor trainer in the AM for 45-60mins including 25-40 minutes at a heart rate of 150-160. My threshold heart rate is 165. I’m letting my heart rate creep up to 165+ during the next few weeks because I’m not that fit so it is easy to get there and I’m impatient. Run 5-8 miles (3 noon with Mary and the Marvin (retired greyhound)) and 2 to 5 in the pm with the children). I also lift weights on Mondays. Nothing very fancy and upper body only, bench presses, standing curls, shoulder shrugs, crunches, occasionally something else such as military presses, butterfly presses, preacher curls. I usually complete 3 set of 10 per exercise with a minute rest between each 10. Pressed for time, which is often, I often find myself doing a set of another exercise as I’m resting from another one. Then it becomes more of a circuit, I guess. I shoot for 200 crunches per workout but will settle for 160. I think I’m bench pressing about 110lbs…I should really check…it’s obviously not an ego thing…and curl 60lbs with the curl bar and 30lbs on each arm when doing concentration curls.. Weights are often just an afterthought

Tuesday: Bike – same as Monday – Swim 1 to 2 km at noon with the Swim Fit group at the Y. I hate this swim. Not because it is hard but because there is some expectation that I use back stroke, breast stroke, and butterfly. There is only one stroke: front crawl. Ok, 2 strokes: front crawl and freestyle. I’m not too keen on the 30 minutes of yoga, stretching, and Gregorian chanting before we even start. However, left to my one devices, I won’t swim. Run – I run with the track club. I train like an 800m-1500m runner on these workouts. I don’t really care that it doesn’t make any physiological sense to do this. I derive a great deal of enjoyment from this kind of suffering. The children are running at the same time so this almost counts as “family time”. I also do weights on Tuesday.

Wednesday: Bike same as Monday and Tuesday in the am (it’s a real bitch to get up at 5am after getting home from the track at 9:30pm but the liter of coffee seems to help. Wednesday night I bike again on the indoor training with the Team JFT group. I sometimes lead this one but lately someone else has been. She likes lots of high cadence work. It takes about an hour and I’m beginning to resent her irritatingly positive comments. I’m not doing “awesome” and I just want her shut up. I try to hide behind a pillar so she can’t read my lips. I also run on Wednesdays, using the same routine as Monday. I go to bed as early as I can on Wednesdays.

Thursday: I sleep in on Thursdays. By “sleep in” I mean I don’t work-out before work. I swim again at noon and try to avoid the chanting. Thursday nights, I’m back at the track (more family time) and I lift weights again.

Friday: Friday is bike-run day. This means getting up at 4:30-4:45am to drink a liter of coffee and get back to the track and ready to go for 6am. This workout is another truly nasty experience…not for the faint of heart or loose of sphincter. The workout consists of lugging bike and mag trainer to the track and riding hard for 5mins (up to the 165-170 bpm range in the last 2-3 minutes followed immediately by 800m on the track. There is no recovery between. Five or six of these is about all I can handle. Sometimes it might be 25 minutes at threshold on the mag trainer followed by 5k threshold run. I would rather do another bike workout on Fridays and I know that less than 12 hours between track workouts is nuts, however, this is another of these JFT things for the benefit of others so I’m content to keep going and physically things held together last winter on this schedule. Mentally, the jury is still out. Finally, I’ve found that if I keep piling intensity on intensity the body will either adapt to recovering on the fly or I will go insane. In any case, I need both of these for the deca.

Saturdays: Saturday am is the long indoor bike workout. By “long” it is currently sitting at 90-120 minutes. I know this is not enough but it is only November. To prevent a complete mental meltdown while biking on the mag trainer I break each half hour into this: minutes 1-4, 6-9, 11-14, and 16-20 HR is 120-130, minutes 5,10,15 and 20-30 HR is 140-150. The advantage of this is it can be repeated for 1,2,3 or even 4 hours. Fun! I revisited my training log from preparing for the triple ironman (I was in scary condition although I hardly had the results to justify it) and noted that I rarely topped 150 bpm on these rides. I thought it was higher for some reason....just another example of thinking that I was faster than I was. We do this as a group, again with the zany JFT people. We rotate the DJ but keep the workout the same. I need to find away to add an hour or two to this without giving up the social aspect of the workout. I also run 30-60 minutes on Saturdays. If I miss a weight workout, I‘ll try to make it up on Saturdays.

Sundays: Sundays are long run days. It’s just like going to church. This is a minimum of 3 hours during the winter. Mary usually comes for some or all of it. On the third week of a three week hard cycle it gets up to 4 hours. During the summer, it is from 4 to an occasional 6 hours.

I know it looks like I’m dreaming but this is very much the mirror image of last year’s winter training except that I added some actual swimming. As always, every fourth week of training is easier and I drop some of the multiple workouts and take the long run down to 90 minutes. I found that last year I had some success with making the last hard week in the four week cycle really hard; stupid, nutty hard.

I also plan to change this up in the spring and summer. I get out on the road with my bike a lot more, increase the intensity of the morning indoor rides to a heart rate of 165 (threshold) and beyond, increase the long bike ride to 4 hours plus, and will add back to back long run days to prepare for the 100 miler. I will likely ditch the Friday bike-run workout because it leaves me rather beat up which compromises the Saturday long ride. I found that last summer I benefited from the big aerobic weekends last year where I would long run on Friday evening, long bike ( four plus hours) on Saturdays and another Long run on Sundays. ….I just didn’t swim.

It has been suggested by those in the know that I work up to a 12 hour swim this summer. I imagine that I could wait until a few months away from the deca but I would rather know sooner rather than later what to expect. I’m planning to do it in a pool because I am sick and twisted.

….and speaking of “sick and twisted” I’m not planning to take a dedicated rest phase after Ultraman Hawaii. As you can probably tell from the early part of this entry, I don’t like taking rests. Rests give me a host of other variables to obsess over.

Toodles