One man's thoughts regarding the conundrum of following/modifying/adjusting training plans
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Should I follow the plan? Follow some of the plan? Not follow the plan? Modify this or modify that? First and foremost, we are self-coached triathletes. We pay a monthly fee for training and racing guidance from Rich, Patrick, and each other. The term “coach” gets thrown around a lot. Rich and Patrick certainly fit the definition of a coach as one who instructs and trains. On the flip side, they’re not typical athletic coaches in the sense they’re not physically right there with us during training. Semantics aside, WE’RE the coaches for ourselves and it’s up to us to get what we want out of the EN experience. We have some really awesome and well thought out training plans at our disposal - OS, IM, HIM, and Short Course. The plans will make you a better triathlete. There are certainly varying degrees to which we follow the training plans. Some of us follow the plans like it’s the law and do exactly as instructed. Some of us use most/some of the plans and tweak things as we see fit. Some of us probably don’t follow the plans much at all. Some of us may do a combination of things at one time or another during a long season. Many of us feel that we’re paying good money each month for the EN plans and we should follow the plans as written because R & P know more about triathlon training than we do. Who hasn’t thought like that? I know I have. R & P certainly know more about triathlon training, coaching and racing than I do. That’s why I’m willing to give them money each month. That stated, I know way more than them about one thing: ME. There are a lot of comments and questions in the forums or on the dashboard about modifying the plans. Heck, Patrick just went all Super Geek and flowcharted the decision process to modify the OS. Many of the questions and comments stem from what I would classify as “guilt” posts. Those would encompass all the “I can’t do the prescribed workout because of X, Y, and Z.” X, Y, and Z could be anything (sick, tired, on vacation, work/family commitments, current conditioning, etc.). We’ve all heard or read the following words before: You don’t have to follow a training plan into a brick wall. If you’re sick or tired, rest and get better to fight another day. If you have other commitments that “should” be a higher life priority, handle those first. Hell, even if laziness is the reason – find your motivation again before soldiering on. Whatever you do… don’t follow your training plan into a brick wall. You’ll just end up regretting the process. This is supposed to be fun! Don’t feel guilty. It is what it is. Most of us probably pay as much (or more) in cable/satellite TV bills than we do for EN. Do you feel guilty that you’re paying all that money but not watching every channel for several hours each day? I very much doubt it. I think I ran my training into a brick wall last spring training for IMTX. I ended up hating the training. Maybe hate is a strong word but I had a strong dislike for it all. It became a chore trying to follow the training plan or should I say it became a chore wedging the prescribed plan into my life. I felt like a slave to the process at times. I finished IMTX and stated I was done with the Ironman distance. I liked the race but didn’t like how I got there. Training was further complicated with the absolutely brutal summer we had in Texas this year. It’s always blazing hot during the summer in Texas but this year was both the warmest and driest summer ever recorded. It made training outdoors very difficult and nearly impossible to follow the training plans without making some huge adjustments. I’m not an indoor training kind of guy either so the treadmill was out of the question. My long run training after IMTX was virtually non-existent. That made the hilly and hot run at the Austin 70.3 a challenge. I lost a little bit of my mojo the second half of the year. I still had three top 10% finishes in my three races after IMTX but I just wasn’t into it. Then came the news about Chris G. That rocked my foundation. I couldn’t help but look at that situation and think that could be me. Odds are that would never happen to me but I’m sure everyone that happened to thought the same thing. I’ll be 42 years old in 2012. I have a wife and my son will turn 7 years old next June. Call it kneejerk or whatever but the concept of leaving it all out there and pushing my body to its limit is now completely gone from my mind. I started to reflect on things a bit. I still love to train. I absolutely love racing. I love being in great shape. So why wasn’t I happy with things last year? Trying to follow a plan became a burden. Instead of making a plan work for me, I was doing the opposite. Of course, it’s not like the EN plans are involuntary or anything but I think many of us are afraid to tinker with a proven commodity. I decided it was time to tinker. As I stated earlier, it’s up to us as individuals to make the most out of EN. What follows is more or less a regurgitation of something I typed in another thread. I'm completely revamping my training in this OS and my training for 2012. I decided to completely focus on long course triathlon and worry less about my top end gears. In order for me to get re-energized and once again commit to an IM (which I like "racing"), I needed to scale things back a bit. I wanted the max week of training for a HIM to be about 10 hours and the max week training for an IM to be about 13 hours. I wanted a little more rest, recovery and personal time with the family unit. I trained on my own for about two seasons and then have done EN for most of the last two seasons. I followed the EN bike and run plans pretty religiously last season. I now know what I like, what I don't, what I thought worked for me, what I thought didn't, etc. and I’m designing a "new" training plan around what I feel works best for me from the standpoint of time commitment, rest, SAU's, and, most importantly, fun. I'm certainly borrowing heavily from EN and putting my own spin on things. Bike: Run: Plans: My OS plan basically looks like this: Day 1 - Bike, Day 2 - Run, Day 3 - Rest, repeat. My proposed training plan for 2012 should look something like this: Monday: 1 hour bike (interval/speed work), 30 minute swim Tuesday: 1 hour run (incorporating interval/speed work) Wednesday: 1 hour bike (interval/speed work), 30 minute swim Thursday: Long run (time dependent on whether I'm training for IM or 70.3) Friday: 45 minute to 1 hour swim Saturday: 1 hour run (interval/speed work) Sunday: Long bike (once again time dependent on whether I'm training for IM or 70.3) My absolute longest week training for IMAZ will be 13.5 hours (with a 2.5 hour run and 5 hour ride). Just because I said I wasn’t going to push my body to its limit doesn’t mean I’m not going to bust my ass and go hard. I fully expect sub-5:00 HIM times this year and a sub-11:00 finish at IMAZ. Neither of which are slow for this 40-something. I had a goal of maybe someday qualifying for the 70.3 World Championships. I had the mentality that I would do whatever was necessary to eventually attain said goal. Not anymore. If it happens to fall in my lap, that would be great. I’m just not willing to make a huge sacrifice anymore. In summary... don’t be afraid the shake things up. Make the training and the experience work for you and not the other way around. If you can follow the plans 100% and you like it and your lifestyle allows for it then go for it. If you start getting bummed out about anything related to the training, just take a step back, reassess the situation and make adjustments accordingly. It’s okay. It’s part of the self-coaching philosophy. R & P offer us a framework of what they feel works best for most AG’ers. What we do with that plan to make it work is up to us.
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Comments
Sorry for the formatting code stuff. I ran it through Word first and copied it from there.
Nevermind - I fixed the coding issue.
Also, my goal is to have more fun this next year. I felt like the dunking donuts guy (going to make the donuts...going to make the donuts) for the last 18 months or so. So I need to have that as a key goal this year.
Thanks again.
You are spot on with that post, you work the plan towards you not because of whats written on paper.
After finishing IMAZ I have been doing some thinking and will be modifying my plan to fit me as I focus back on my true love powerlifting.
Jan and Feb are going to be interesting months.
Excellent thoughts, thanks for sharing!
Exactly what it was like for me last year. Fun and balance is my slogan for 2012.