Planning to Plan

It’s in my nature to construct elaborate plans and strategies for everything I attempt to do. I don’t always follow them mind you, but I can sure build them! My Kona dream is no different. Essentially I have from now until January to prepare myself to have a really strong base that can handle a solid training load from January to June. I will do Tupper Lake next year as my first shot at a ½ Ironman distance race (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile, bike, 13.1 mile run). There are 19 weeks left in 2007 and I’ve been in a sort of “Prep” phase for the last 2 weeks. I’ve just been trying to get back into the habit of training to a schedule and cleaning up my diet. I have a week’s vacation in Montauk planned beginning next Tuesday and continuing to the following Tuesday. I’ll be bringing, Clyde (my bike), my wetsuit and of course my sneakers fully intending to ride, bike and swim at least twice during the week. By the time I get back we are down to solid 16 weeks to create an aero-base building training program. Here are my SMART goals for this period:

Build a strong aerobic base to +10 percent of the ½ IM distance in all 3 disciplines as defined by:
Bike: Be able to complete a 60 mile ride by 12/17/07 maintaining an average HR of below 143 in 4 hours
Run: Be able to complete a 14 mile run by 12/17/07 maintaining an average HR of below 148 in 2.5 hours
Swim: Be able to complete a continuous 2000m swim in 42 minutes by 12/17/07
Build speed on run for 15K time trial to sub 90 minute by 12/2/07 (9:40 pace)
Complete 9 NYRR races for NYC marathon entry.
Complete 95% of all scheduled workouts.
Build and follow a consistent healthy eating plan to reduce body fat to 18-20% by 12/1/07.

Piece of cake (fat free, sugar free cake of course).
After putting it out to my online triathlon family at http://www.triscoop.com/ (check them out they ROCK) and getting some sage advice from my mentor, coach, and friend Coach Adam (check him out here: http://www.racewithpurpose.com, he is amazing for so many reasons), I decided to re-think my training plan for the rest of this year to align with this goals. It is still a work in progress and feel free to comment on it, but I am thinking that I will take out 1 workout per week of each sport and replace it with strength training and core work (blech!). That will leave me 2 workouts per week in each sport one of which will be a steady state long event at an aerobic heart rate (for me that’s below 148 on the run and 143 on the bike, swimming is just by feel). The other one will be a technique workout for the swim, a steady mid-distance tempo run, and a high cadence bike session. Given my desire to nail a 15k race in December, I will also add one speed work/ hill workout on the run somewhere along the way. This plan should get me where I want to go. I’ll tackle the whole eating issue in another post.

I am open to any ideas on this, so if you have’em, post’em!

781 days to go.