It's been an extraordinarily eventful year and summer in the christofferson household. Extraordinary in the sense of a lot of things going on....
For instance, as I pen this missive, I am sitting next to Anders in the US Air Club at LAX waiting for our red-eye home. We've spent the lst three days out here in LA-LA land scouring the west side for a suitable home base for AC. On one hand, not what you would normally want 5-weeks out from your "A" race IM but absolutely what I want to be doing in my life....
That's been pretty much the way its been this year--lots of fun/cool life-stuff taking priority. That combined with my late start due to Aconcagua in January means I have substantially less training under the hood at this point....
That said, I've had a surprisingly good triathlon year so far. I've raced nine times this year, 8 sprints and one Half. I've been blessed to win 6 and finish second twice in my AG in these races--which is the best I've ever done from an AG competitive perspective for the first nine races of a season...hard to feel down about that for sure!
Also, while I definitely went through an over-trained stretch in July due to my dramatic ramp-up in June/early July, I now feel pretty good. I've lost some weight and my workouts are generally encouraging all things considered. My fitness is building nicely right now.
While I'm simply not going to be able to bang out multiple 30+ hour training weeks as I've done over the last few seasons, I still feel like I have a reasonable chance of being pretty competitive at Tahoe....
My swim is about 5-7% slow (in sprints and in training) relative to the last few years--this is about a 4-6 minutes at the IM distance, which I'm comfortable with. I will say that my gap to prior years has been diminishing over the last few weeks as I've upped my swim volume (I hit 45,000 yards in July) and have encorporated more 3,000-4,000 yard swims. I think I'll be fine for the swim in Tahoe.
While I haven't hit as many 100+ rides in this build, I do have 6-7 under my belt now including a 106-miler this week at a pretty good effort (my PM is down on my S5 right now so I can't report the power). My bike rides have been pretty solid over the last 5-6 races so once again, my bike fitness looks pretty good.
On the run, I'm very vulnerable. I finally was able to get my first run longer than 13 miles this week with a 16-miler. I'll get a couple more of those in the next two weeks and that will have to be that. My knee and my body's general level of fatigue have really held me back this year....I seem to plateau at 110-120 miles/month this year vs the 140-160 that I was able to put down over the last few years....It is what it is, and what it is, is not that good!
Still, I do feel like I'm building fitness nicely and I've just had a look at my competition at IMLT and while I must say it's wide-open and I'm certainly not the favorite, I wouldn't write my chances off by any means---more on that shortly.
In the meantime, I'm going to do the best I can getting the volume in. I'm at 22 hours this week through Saturday so if I can get home and log some time training tomorrow I'll have a reasonable IM build week, despite the travel and hours spent looking at houses. I'm hopeful I can put in 25+ a week over the next two weeks as well. I also plan to race 1-2 times more before Tahoe--more on that later...
Anyways, I plan on focusing more blog time on my final run-up to Tahoe so please tune back as I get ready to try to get back to Kona one more time!
For instance, as I pen this missive, I am sitting next to Anders in the US Air Club at LAX waiting for our red-eye home. We've spent the lst three days out here in LA-LA land scouring the west side for a suitable home base for AC. On one hand, not what you would normally want 5-weeks out from your "A" race IM but absolutely what I want to be doing in my life....
That's been pretty much the way its been this year--lots of fun/cool life-stuff taking priority. That combined with my late start due to Aconcagua in January means I have substantially less training under the hood at this point....
That said, I've had a surprisingly good triathlon year so far. I've raced nine times this year, 8 sprints and one Half. I've been blessed to win 6 and finish second twice in my AG in these races--which is the best I've ever done from an AG competitive perspective for the first nine races of a season...hard to feel down about that for sure!
Also, while I definitely went through an over-trained stretch in July due to my dramatic ramp-up in June/early July, I now feel pretty good. I've lost some weight and my workouts are generally encouraging all things considered. My fitness is building nicely right now.
While I'm simply not going to be able to bang out multiple 30+ hour training weeks as I've done over the last few seasons, I still feel like I have a reasonable chance of being pretty competitive at Tahoe....
My swim is about 5-7% slow (in sprints and in training) relative to the last few years--this is about a 4-6 minutes at the IM distance, which I'm comfortable with. I will say that my gap to prior years has been diminishing over the last few weeks as I've upped my swim volume (I hit 45,000 yards in July) and have encorporated more 3,000-4,000 yard swims. I think I'll be fine for the swim in Tahoe.
While I haven't hit as many 100+ rides in this build, I do have 6-7 under my belt now including a 106-miler this week at a pretty good effort (my PM is down on my S5 right now so I can't report the power). My bike rides have been pretty solid over the last 5-6 races so once again, my bike fitness looks pretty good.
On the run, I'm very vulnerable. I finally was able to get my first run longer than 13 miles this week with a 16-miler. I'll get a couple more of those in the next two weeks and that will have to be that. My knee and my body's general level of fatigue have really held me back this year....I seem to plateau at 110-120 miles/month this year vs the 140-160 that I was able to put down over the last few years....It is what it is, and what it is, is not that good!
Still, I do feel like I'm building fitness nicely and I've just had a look at my competition at IMLT and while I must say it's wide-open and I'm certainly not the favorite, I wouldn't write my chances off by any means---more on that shortly.
In the meantime, I'm going to do the best I can getting the volume in. I'm at 22 hours this week through Saturday so if I can get home and log some time training tomorrow I'll have a reasonable IM build week, despite the travel and hours spent looking at houses. I'm hopeful I can put in 25+ a week over the next two weeks as well. I also plan to race 1-2 times more before Tahoe--more on that later...
Anyways, I plan on focusing more blog time on my final run-up to Tahoe so please tune back as I get ready to try to get back to Kona one more time!
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