Round One of my 2015-2016 winter training is now complete!!!..
To recap: I just
finished up an 8 week training plan that started immediately following my last
marathon December 5th. The
plan allowed me to drop my weekly mileage by 40% compared to November to let my
legs recover a bit from the higher mileage grind. I took the saved time to work on my swim and
bike training that had been put on the backburner to focus on training for my
fall marathons. The miles I did run
were shorter but higher quality speed workouts that were intended to adapt me
to the marathon pace of 6:45 which I will be training at this spring.
Below is a comparison of my swim/bike/run training in
January 2015 vs 2016. Essentially I ran
the same miles as I did last January but since I cut out most “junk miles” this
round it lowered my avg pace and saved 3 total hours of training time. It’s worth mentioning I took a 30% hit in
elevation this January as my speed work was mainly done on a track or flat
surface, but I believe this was a good trade-off for the results I achieved. Overall I only put in three more total training hours
this January compared to last year but I was able to increase my
swimming distance by 107% and my biking by 64% while keeping my run miles the
same... pretty awesome!
In closing I’ll admit was a little skeptical going into this
plan because of the mileage drop. I had
planned to keep up my 200+ monthly average and didn’t want to risk losing
fitness over the winter months. However
after finishing strong and healthy and clocking one of my fastest 5K’s this
month, I’m completely sold on this plan and I will be doing something
similar again next year. So now that things are wrapped up I'll be taking
the next two weeks to just enjoy my workouts with no pressure or plan in place and on
February 15th round two starts up and that is where the real fun
begins... stay tuned and Happy Running!
- Cory
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