Season Training Notes

Year three of trying to get faster at triathlons in the books. I like to look back on the years and months and even weeks to see what I can see. To try to see what worked, to try to see what I didn't notice at the time, etc.

Last year my numbers looked like this

2012

	Distance	Time
Swim	258,720 yards	79:30 hours
Bike	2,100 miles	124:50 hours
Run	533 miles	82 hours

This year looks like this

2013

	Distance	Time
Swim	211,200 yards	60:30 hours
Bike	1,334 miles	79:30 hours
Run	288 miles	44:30 hours

That's substantial. But there are are some significant differences. Mostly, last year I trained for a 3.5 months longer. If I trim out those months the totals are a little more lined up

2012 (same number of days)

	Distance	Time
Swim	214,720 yards	65 hours
Bike	1,908 miles	110 hours
Run	404 miles	61 hours

But there's still a pretty significant difference.

Another thing that's not immediately apparently when staring at this year's numbers is that actually my effort over the entire year this year decreased over time. It's not a terribly interesting graph, but basically what it looks like is that I started out strong, and then over the course of the spring and summer slowly decreased load.

That reduced workload mainly came in the form of just fewer workouts and when I did do them they were fairly short. For instance, I only did nine runs all season over 6 miles, every single other run was less than 5. I'm sure there's some way to make that work, but it's not your typical recipe for success when you need to run that distance at full speed at the end of a race. There was a similar pattern on the bike.

Looking back I'm not sure what if I would change much. I basically just decided that getting enough sleep and putting family stuff ahead of racing would be the plan. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to dominate, but sometimes for me it works better to stay up and hang out with my wife than go to sleep and make sure I can be up and out of the house every morning before anyone else wakes up.

Heading into next year, I don't anticipate any more time. So I'm trying to formulate a plan that allows me to have a pretty reduced load but produce some decent results. Time will tell :)