Sanity and Hope

I am in the process of creating an Annual Training Plan (ATP). I have a whole checklist that I go through to set one up, and the result is about a year's worth of training, plus I schedule haircuts, massages, bikini waxes, and dentist, eye, ob-gyn and mammogram appointments. Plus I pencil in when I am going to get bikes tuned up, driveway sealed and assorted other recurring home maintenance things.

It starts with race selection. The only thing I am registered for so far is Ironman Canada. With the success I had at my 55th Birthday Workout Extravaganza©, I decided to consider doing Goofy Challenge again, provided I could con someone else into doing it with me. Well that didn't pan out, but I decided that instead, I will just run 60 miles for the week, and that will be a good bout of running. It's easier to recover quickly and get back to training after that than it would be if I ran a marathon, just like a few weeks ago. While I am ramping up slowly (no good reason to train too hard right now) and could run more already, I'm giving myself some rest.

My 60-mile run week will be done as (6) 10-milers, 1 a day Monday through Saturday, Sunday off, a few swims in there and one bike ride just to keep me honest. The following week I will take off from running and get back on my swimming and biking.

Through the end of this year, I will keep doing long-ish swims on Fridays so that I can knock out my 3rd annual 10k+ swim. I mean, why not? Plus since I won't be biking so much I have the time to swim, so I may as well.

After the 60-mile run week and a tiny rest, I will begin "conventional" Ironman training. I mean conventional for me. Still probably more than a lot of folks would be doing, but it will be less than what I was doing in winter/spring of 2010 preparing for Ultraman Canada. In fact, I won't even do any swims over 4K until June! Imagine that! I am considering Ultraman Hawaii for next year, but learned a few things in the last couple years: 1) I can pile on the endurance quickly in any of the 3 sports; 2) I can ramp up to something big in like 8 weeks. So based on that, I'm going to "just" do Ironman training through Ironman Canada, and then if I decide to do Ultraman Hawaii, I'll be able to get ready for it (ready as I can, anyway) in 3 months.

With this leisurely ATP, I am going to sneak in a 1/2 NothingMan during Thanksgiving week, see if I can sneak in a 9,000-yd swim/90-mile ride (aka Day 1 of Ultraman) during Christmas week, the 3 indoor triathlons that start end of January, Triple T end of May, and maybe an Oly or 2 during the summer, seeing as how Ironman Canada isn't until end of August. Or, I will just bike a lot! I have a bunch more work to do on the ATP, as in checking its progress so far, it shows I would have done 938 hours by Ironman Canada, and that just can't be (I hope!), although since I arbitrarily decided that my training season began 8/8 (which meant the prior season was 52 weeks), I kicked things off with a bunch of solid training. I still have to build in serious recovery weeks so I don't blow myself up.

So, hopefully, I will end up constructing an ATP that yields a solid (I strongly believe a PR is still possible at my advanced age) performance at Ironman Canada, keeps me sane and allows me to still have plenty of fun even while I'm training at a high level.

And now for the hopeful part: I've known something is up with my back for awhile, and it dawned on me last week that I'd messed with the cleat shimming on my left bike shoe, or rather, it had been messed with, plus I got a new bike with shorter cranks, and all this together may be the root of my issues. I had someone look at me on LGL and we re-shimmed the left shoe, and I will test it out for a few weeks. I did my first ride today and it felt so much better than it's felt for, well, over a year. If this yields good results (and there will be other ways I'll be able to detect improvements other than while on the bike), oh man, then it would mean I really was able to absorb all that 2009-2010 crazy train stuff I did. And that I have better performance in me, and it would just be such a confidence boost! But only time will tell...still, I am hopeful.

Meanwhile...I need to dispense with the unused Halloween candy. I ate too much of it, and then wasn't even around for the handful of trick-or-treaters. I feel motivated to clean up my diet for this season ahead. Even though I'm an old lady, I intend to be a fast one!