When to Start Your OutSeason Training Plan
Hi,
I'm seeing this and related questions a lot in the forums and in our inbox so I jammed this out. Please add your thoughts and I'll turn this into a wiki and blog post. Thanks!
When to Start the OutSeason
It’s that time of year again, as athletes end their 2011 season and begin to plan their training and racing for 2012. Inside the team we are now fielding many season planning questions and the Big One is:
“Given my race schedule for 2012, when should I start my OutSeason Training Plan?”
Answer: you should start the OS when your head is ready to commit to about 20wks of focused, hard work.
This is a function of the nature of the season you just ended, the length of your 2012 season, and your own personal constraints during the winter months.
Your 2011 Season
If it’s been a long one, especially if you have raced the late-ish season Ironmans of Canada, Louisville or Wisconsin, or the late season races of Ironman Kona, Florida, Arizona, or Cozumel, you definitely want to take some unstructured downtime to recover your body and reset your head. Our OutSeason training plans are tough. We’re going to ask you to a lot of hard work. You definitely want to be a mental place where you are ready and eager to do that work, not feeling like you have to do the work now because you have race on Date X in 2012. Unstructured is just that -- do what you want to do, staying active, maintaining your running frequency, etc, but consider not training with a scheduled training plan. Again, your priority is to reset your head before diving into the hard work.
The Length of Your 2012 Season
If you’re racing a late 2012 race, you want to err on the side of starting your OS training later rather than sooner. More importantly, definitely want to break your 2012 season into smaller, more manageable chunks that have you moving from short term goal/race to short term goal/race, vs putting your feet on the floor at 5:30am in December thinking you are training for Ironman Florida 2012. You will be insane by May, we promise.
Your Personal Constraints
When does the weather sentence you to the drainer or dreadmill? How far into 2012 will you be on those damn things? What are your work and/or family commitments during holidays and winter months? In short, training time during the winter can be very costly -- indoors, in the cold/dark, shoehorned in around holiday to commitments, occurring months and months before your 2012 races, etc. Be realistic about these personal costs and pick a start date for your OutSeason that reflects this assessment.
“But what about my goal race of the Podunktown 70.3 on April 15th? How does that affect my OS start date?”
Please go here to read our thoughts on transitioning from the OS to your A-race training plan. If you’re a TeamEN member, please take the Season Planning Survey to have Coach Rich plan your season for you. In short, we’ve managed the back end of the OS -- how to integrate that with the rest of your season, transition you to your A-race plan -- a thousand times. We have/are an app for that! But what is much more important is you choosing the best OS starting date for you, based on the three bullets above. Don’t worry about what means on the back end. That’s easy to manage.
OS Start Date Considerations and Recommendations
Within TeamEN, our traditional OS start dates, when we like to get massive numbers of athletes starting the same plans at the same time, to maximize the accountability and mojo potential, are:
- ~October 1st -- good for athletes who finished their goal races for the 2011 season in July or August, “maybe” folks who raced Ironman Wisconsin who have seriously unplugged for the balance of September and are genuinely ready to get back at it.
- ~November 1st -- better start date for the IMWI and September 70.3 folks.
- ~December 1st -- we do NOT recommend you start your OS plan in December. In our 5yrs of experience with guiding athletes through the OS, December is just very, very messy and more often than not December OS athletes end up doing a hard reset and starting their OS over in January.
- ~January 1st -- for athletes who finished their season in November and/or have very late 2012 races.
- ~Feb 1st -- similar to the January OS folks.
In summary, our OutSeason training plans are the best tools we have for making you a much, much faster athlete. We will ask you to work very hard; not long, but hard. These are intense sessions that have created huge bike and running speed boosts for hundreds of athletes across the last 5 years. As such, you need to put your head in a place where you can commit to about 20wks of hard, challenging work -- work that will create massive PR’s for you in 2012!
Comments
I think my head is ready for the work, but not sure my knee is ready for the run, yet. Still working on the rehab building the muscle that the ortho folks are recommending. This friday(9/9) will mark the 6 weeks post surgery date for me.
I know what the feelings are for the swim in the out-season, but it feels like I need something in addition to the bike to get started.
I'm already faster on the bike than I was pre-surgery. My FTP is somewhere around 320 with a peak of 1061. I still have to do a proper FTP test. Yesterday's 1hr ride put me at 310 watts but that was with forced stops and people in the way on the park path and no way to get around them.
I'm hoping to start the OS October 1, if not November 1.
My first races that I've got planned for post surgery are Oct 30, and Thanksgiving Day. They're both 10Ks and I'm not planning on running them full out which would be the danger of a 5K. Something happens when I hear "take your marks"... They are both flat courses, and I know that I will have to run them slower than an all out 5K. The last 5K I did, was "Detroit Style". Elbows and getting tripped up. I even took a tumble and managed to break my previous PR by 73 seconds. So, part of the reasoning for the 10K...
Thanks for getting this ball rolling, Rich. The advice is spot-on, as usual.
The only tweak I would make - and it probably goes w/o saying for most EN people - is to make sure that your body is also injury free and ready for the work required. In watching last year's Oct and Nov OS threads, in some cases where athletes embarked on the OS with nagging injuries or more likely just lingering issues from the season, they had to eventually do a hard reset or stand-down, esp on the run. There is so much intensity in the OS plans that any issue will (IMO) be magnified into an injury that will cost the athlete valuable time and effort to 'catch up' once they are healed.
Admittedly most people don't finish a season injured, per se, but IMO many LC triathletes do carry around underlying issues that will often clear up with a week or 3 of transition/unstructured, and it's worth reminding folks to be healthy first.