"Off-Seasoning"

With my last big race of the year behind me and a fairly long gap before my first significant race of 2016 I’ve entered what I consider to be one of the most important times of the year, the so-called “offseason”.  This is the period of time which separates the dedicated runner from the casual one and when the snow melts it is always clear who has hit it hard and who has fallen off during the winter months.  Like many others I can certainly fall into the trap of slacking off during the winter, justifying my rest as “recovery” and blaming the weather for missing a speed session or two... and believe me once that snowball starts rolling it can be hard to stop.   To keep myself on track I’ve put a clear plan in place to cover these winter months and prep me for spring training which is only 8 weeks away. 

The running portion of my training will be covered by a variant on the 5K plan below… I put in optional cross training for the Monday and Wednesday recovery runs.  Going with a 5-K plan I’m able to drop my mileage significantly while keeping up with my speed work.  This will give my legs some much needed recovery while allowing me to dedicate more of my training time to swimming, biking and strength training.

For swimming I’m less specific, I scheduled workouts for Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and each workout consists of mainly slower build swims, pulls and kicks… once I get my base built up in the coming weeks I’ll start adding in more speed work.  So far the swimming has been going great although since I’ll have to send my Garmin 920XT in for repairs this week I will be back to manually counting my laps for a couple weeks and that is going to suck!  I’ll have a post shortly reviewing some of the new gear I picked up for this year in case anyone is looking to upgrade or replace their current swim equipment.

As you may know biking is by far my least favorite activity in my winter triathlon training.  Don’t get me wrong, going for a nice bike ride in the country is a lot of fun however sitting on a trainer or spin bike at the Y is rough!  I’ve been doing a lot of my cycling during my lunches at the Y; I can get 30-40 minute ride at normally a pretty high intensity and that can really relieve some stress from the work day.   I’d like to get in the habit of getting to the 5:30 spin class at the Y but mornings have been hit or miss for me lately.  Right now I’m just trying to stay consistent and slowly build my time on the bike so when the spring hits I’m prepared to hit the roads hard.

The last piece of my program is the strength training, I’m primarily working on core strength and stabilizing my midsection, especially with my back problems this is a pretty big focus for the winter months.  I do strength training 2-3 days a week either on my lunch break or before work at the Y though I’ll mention I’ve been a little hit or miss here lately, I’m really got to nail down my days going into the new year, again planning and consistency are so important to keep the training on track. 

So that is my game plan for the next several weeks so that when my marathon training picks up in February I’m ready to rock it!!   Hope all your training is going well too, let me know if I can help in any way or feel free to give me suggestions! 

Happy Running!! - Cory