Game Plan

Two of my favorite runners (if you read this, you're one of my favorites) over at Runner's Lounge are having Take It and Run Thursday once again. This week's topic applies to what has been on my mind lately: training plans.

My main plan for the foreseeable future is "don't over do it!" Big surprise, huh? An injured athlete doesn't want to over do it. But thats my plan and I'm sticking to it. For a while.

I am going to keep the effort on workouts fairly easy. I'm going to live in a world somewhere in between the edge of over training and half-assing it. Normally, I teeter on the edge of over training. Honestly, thats how I like to be. Right on the edge, improving as fast as I possibly can.

But then I inevitably crash. Every time. Thats not where I like to be.

I'm taking a page out of Chuckie V's book and I'm going to go by it this time. I knew it was a good idea before, but I didn't have the patience to do it; as a result, I got injured. Through the end of July I am going to stay away from any anaerobic exercise. None of it. My average heart rate for each workout will be between 150 and 165, with anything above 160 being rare, and anything over 165 being forbidden.

My goal is to be able to live healthy while training. If I want to run to the pool, I want to feel as though I can do it without teetering over that edge of over training.

"But Doug," you say, "won't that slow you down?"

Nope. It won't, unless you're only looking at my 5k time, it will make me better. It will make me stronger because my one limiting factor lately has been injury. Until I can eliminate injury, there's nothing I can do to improve fitness over the course of time. This sporadic training is not going to make me faster in the long run, and backing off from the edge will help me control that variable.

Once August rolls around, I'm going to start incorporating limited anaerobic workouts into my schedule. Starting with very few fast miles and building up through August and September. This should get me in shape to run well at Chicago, but at this point I haven't even ran for a month so I'm going to keep that on the back burner. Let's just say I'm considering backing off my goal at Chicago to 3:10 and shooting for sub 3 at Boston, because I want nothing more than to run Boston with Nic, Bill, Reid, and Nitmos in 2009!

In summary, here's my long term training plan:

April - July: Slow build in all three sports, all aerobic base building. Half ironman at end of July.

August - September: Change focus back to running, and begin limited anaerobic workouts

October: Taper, Chicago Marathon, Recover

November - April: Train for Boston, maintain base in swimming and biking. Maybe use a bastardization of the FIRST training plan to incorporate a lot of cross training.

April - September: Train for something I dare not utter until I complete half of one first.

Well, theres the plan. I guess I better get to it, huh?