It's A Wrap!

Now as the racing is done for the season, it's a good time to reflect back and see what has been achieved and what brought me here.

Need For Speed. A Series Of C-Races

After IM 70.3 Mallorca in May I steered my training towards more speed and intensity, which would serve the up-coming sprint and olympic-distance races in late May and June. This meant stepping out of the long-distance triathlete's relative comfort zone of 4-5h bike rides and two hour runs that were replaced by some lung-bursting action on the track, pool and the bike trainer.

TRAINING MY WAY part IV

Functional Strength

I used to be really into weights. Actually, that was all the training I did for several years. 3-4 times a week with specific days for every big muscle groups. By my current standards, I was in pretty strong condition. I mean, we used to call washers the barbell weights of 10kg and under. Nowadays, that's often pretty much all I'm using at the gym! I guess I can admit it now, the sole goal was to grow muscles bigger because that's what looks good. Right? 

TRAINING MY WAY part III

Nutrition

I'm going to have to disappoint those of you waiting for delicious easy-to-cook receipts on this one. I'm not going to reveal to be on some super trendy come-and-go diet either. What I will do is cover some of the very basic things that I think are important in an endurance athlete's diet. In addition, I'm giving a brief look at planning my race nutrition.

TRAINING MY WAY part II

Rest and Recovery 

I wrote about planning the training in Part I of this four part Training My Way post. Now, if everything was perfect, we would have planned and executed our training so as to be always fresh and ready for the key training sessions. Often life changes things a little however, and we will find ourselves tired earlier than expected. Then, you will have to be able to listen to your body and adapt the plan accordingly. I've found this to be a lot harder than it sounds. Triathletes are usually goal driven and very motivated and it's hard to step away from the path you've chosen. Also, to make positive adaptations to our fitness, we'll have to push our limits a bit but it can be a fine line between over-training and over-reaching, which, when applied correctly, leads to supercompensation. You have to maintain clear sight of the big picture and make decisions so that you'll eventually reach your goals. I like to guide my decisions with questions like: "Do I have to miss tomorrow's key session or will the quality of it suffer if I'll push through today's session even though I'm really tired?".

TRAINING MY WAY part I

After my last season's good results I've been contacted by several fellow age-groupers or to-be-triathletes keen to know about my training. This sudden interest in my doings has felt somewhat strange as I consider myself still quite new to the sport and also very much on the receiving side when it comes to knowledge about training. I have been, though, more than happy to tell everything I know. But after a few enquiries I have found myself repeating pretty much the same things so I decided to write something here for everybody to read.

I have divided the text in four different posts each containing one topic. This division borrows heavily from Matt Dixon, one of the top coaches in triathlon and whose texts I regularly enjoy reading from Triathlete Magazine. According to Dixon triathlon performance is based on these four equally important pillars: 1. Endurance training, 2. Rest & recovery, 3. Nutrition, 4. Functional strength. Here in this first post, I'm going to cover planning my season with swimming, biking and running.

Here We Go Again

It's about time to break the radio silence here. Training for the season 2014 has begun and the goals been set. I'm really looking forward to the coming race season! For now, I'll be spending a lot of time in this scenery:

Espoonlahti swimming pool

Cyclocross trails nearby

Esport Arena indoor track

A Quick Look at The Season 2013 Training Stats

Yesterday I did a little review of my training from this year. Here are some numbers I found.

Total hours: 547

Weekly average: 10.5