Sunday, August 7, 2011

1st IM build week in the books!

As you know, this week was the first week of my last Meso-training cycle for 2011. This is a 16 week build block leading to IMAZ. More specifically, I'll do 13-14 weeks of "building" and 2-3 weeks of tapering. I'm doing a bit of research right now and trying to determine how long my taper should be but I'm confident it will be in the 14-21 day range.

My build training plan is pretty simple and is built on a foundation of three key workouts each week: a continuous swim of at least 1 hour, a bike ride of at least 5 hours, and a run of at least 2 hours. There are other training objectives for each week of course but I feel if I can hit these three w/os each week I'll be pretty solid come IMAZ. Of course, I'll be flexible if my life/work schedule interfers or if I feel training overload at some point. I'll also be gradually increasing the intensity and duration of these three key workouts as the build rolls along. In terms of total training volume, I'm aiming for training time in the 20-30 hours/week range with a thought that I'll generally follow a bigger week with a lesser week, and visa-versa.

In any event, my three key workouts for this first week were:

Swim: 65 minutes--2.4 miles
Bike: 5:26--95.2 miles
Run: 2:06--13 miles

My aggregate volume for the week was:

Swim: 10,560 yards
Bike: 280 miles
Run: 41.4 miles
Time: 25:00

So all in all a pretty solid first week--especially considering that Monday was a travel day and I only had a 30 minute run on that day. I feel pretty good and it seemed like a reasonable workload for my body. I'm definitely getting fitter now.

Looking ahead, I'll probably do a bit less next week as I need to be up in NYC and I'm planning on racing again this weekend (this will be my only race in August)

All good so far!

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