October Through December Plan

I'll start with telling you a bit more about me. I started doing triathlons in 1989 at the age of 24 and I got to the "pretty reasonable" stage i.e. I'd place in the top 10 or so at age group races and I could race men's elite without being completely embarrassed. My typical Olympic Distance results would be a 21 minutes swim, a hour to an hour five on the bike (depending on the course) and 37 - 38 minutes for the run..... so round about two hours overall. I was probably better, relatively speaking, at longer events. In those days, in the UK we had a lot of over distance events where, for example, you'd have a mile swim, followed by a forty mile bike and a ten mile run. Being a strong biker and runner, I loved these events. The half Ironman was about as far as I could go and remain competitive ... I just wasn't able to put in the miles to compete at the full distance.

After the '93 season, I took thirteen years off. I had a "big" job, a young family and I couldn't spare the time. However, once our kids started to be a bit more independent and began swimming competitively, my wife and I began competing again too. (She's a runner) I did one race in 2006, two in 2007 and six this year. Next year, I will be in my third season back in the sport so, if you go back to this post, you'll see that I'm looking to improve about 7.5% this year.

For me, this means improving from around 2:32 to around 2:20 or 12 minutes. If I look at this year's race results, I'm typically finishing 4th or 5th in my age group. My swimming is a little worse (8th -10th), my biking is "par" (4th -5th) and my running is "par" or a little better (3rd - 5th).

This means that I really need an across- the- board improvement. I'm not going to find 12 minutes in any one discipline, I need to improve all three by a similar amount.

If I look at times, my swim is about 30 minutes, my bike about 1:11 and my run is 46-ish. T1 is typically 3:30 and T2 1:30 to give 2:32 overall.

My plan is to get my swim down to around 27 minutes, my bike to 1:08 and my run to 41 minutes. If I can then shave a minute from transition, I'll make my 2:20 goal.

As I said in the previous post, my initial focus will be on running. With this in mind, I did a 5k on Saturday after a month or so of training as and when I feel like it. I finished in 21:12 which was OK. However, a) I'm a fair way off of my early September peak and b) I started way too fast. I think that if I'd prepared properly, I'd have finished around the 20:45 mark or around 6:40 pace.

If you go to the Daniel's website, you can see that this pace equates to a 43 minute 10k. Based on my personal experience, I reckon to add 1:30 -2:00 minutes on to my usual 10k time to give a "triathlon equivalent"

Therefore, in order to hit next season's goal of a 41 minute triathlon 10k, I need to be able to run a 39 - 39:30 10k in the spring of 2009 and to do this comfortably, I need to run a sub- 19 minute 5k early in the year.

My October- December plan will be based around 5 runs per week. One of these runs will be a soccer match (which is really good training!) and the other runs will be ....

1. Long run (10-14 miles) @ 8:00 - 8:45 min/mile pace
2. Steady run (6-8 miles) @ 7:00 - 7:30 min/mile pace
3. Long Pace Intervals, working towards (4 * 1 mile) @ 6:30 min/mile pace. I could also do these on the road.
   
4. VO2max Intervals, working towards (8 * 1000m) @ 6:00 min/mile pace

On my rest week, I will run a timed 5k in order to monitor progress.