The Hardest Week

I believe it's fair to say that the current school of thought when it comes to hard core training of any kind with endurance sports, e.g. running, cycling, triathlon, etc..., is that the body, and thus the athlete, performs better when on a cyclical training schedule. I don't know who is responsible for inventing the concept, but I first noticed it when I used CTS as my coaching provider. I suspect it came from Chris Carmichael's training program with Lance.

Don't consider this a ringing endorsement of CTS as a coaching provider. To be fair, I've had rather mixed results in my tenure there. Turnover is a problem and it felt like the coaches never really had a vested interest in my training or results. Whether that was due to the sheer number of athletes allocated to each coach (I recall once my coach at the time remarked that he had 15 Adam's, so god only knows how many athletes he was actually coaching at the time), or they genuinely didn't care about my results because I was never a rock star.

Anyway, I digress. My training plan is on 3-week cycles, two weeks on, one week "off." And here, "off" does not mean no workouts, it simply means lower volume and lower intensity volume. The theory is that the recovery week allows the body to, well, recover, and get stronger. With my 3-week cycle, and it may be this way for all cyclical training programs, I don't know, my hardest week is always the week prior to the recovery week. It is the week with the most volume and the most intensity. Consider this week: almost 10K meters swimming, 165 miles cycling, and 29 miles running, and my day off was Wednesday when I got a much needed 90-minute massage. There are 5 days of running, 4 of cycling with one being a 96-mile ride, and 3 days of swimming.

I already missed my 7-mile tempo run on Tuesday due to a run and power class the night before, and the legs still recovering from a late brick on Saturday evening. And tonight, I finished 2-hour trainer ride just after 10pm. Tomorrow is relatively easy with only a 3.5 mile run at lunch and Master's swim tomorrow evening.

The training is going well and my running, which has long since been my weakest link, has improved significantly over the last two seasons. I just wish I wasn't tired all the time.