At some point everyone faces this traveller's dilemma: The stuff you want to take on a trip will not all fit into your suitcase. One solution is to add a suitcase. The other is to pack less stuff. But what if you can't just add another suitcase? Maybe you are going backpacking, where a second backpack is not an option. What I have been struggling with this week is similar to that. How to fit all of the workouts I need to do into week.
To make sense of this situation we have to define what a week is. I follow a seven day week cycle. Some athletes, especially senior athletes (ahem, my age), follow a nine day cycle. I don't, because I still work and I have several workouts that are fixed on specific days. The benefit of a nine day cycle is that it offers two more days to recover. The problem is that the day of the week a workout happens keeps changing.
Triathlon requires performing reasonably well in three activities, each of which exists as a sport unto itself. Sports that require one's exclusive attention to master. Practicing a sport once or twice a week is not enough to gain proficiency. Too much effort will drift into the realm of diminishing returns, high fatigue and possible injury. Three or four solid, well planned workouts are about right, with plenty of rest time in between. But triathlon involves three activities, and that means nine workouts per week. In seven days. Where is the rest time?
In his book Fast After 50, Joe Friel makes the case that senior athletes must avoid the temptation of doing mostly long and slow straining, and instead include more high intensity workouts than their sport normally calls for, along with strength training. The high intensity stuff is required to offset the normal loss of aerobic capacity due to aging. The strength training is required to offset the natural loss of muscle tissue caused by the gradual reduction in testosterone levels. At the same time, he points out that, as a rule, the older we get the more recovery time we need.
To help bring his ideas into focus he organises training into three intensities:
- Aerobic capacity (very high intensity, short durations)
- Lactate threshold (high intensity, medium durations)
- Aerobic threshold (low intensity, long durations)
- Strength training
(The third one, aerobic threshold, is what we gravitate to, long and slow.)
Each of these is then broken down into three dosage levels, which Friel calls High Dose, Medium Dose, and Low Dose. The main difference between dose levels is the duration of the work intervals and the number of repetitions. What does not change is the intensity at which the work is done.
Next, he lays out a hierarchy of priority based on the duration of the event you are training for. In my case it works out to be
So in the early base period, the aerobic threshold workout gets priority one, so use the high dose version. Strength training gets medium dose, and the aerobic threshold workout gets low dose.
At the same time I am digesting this in Fast After 50 I am working through Friel's The Triathlete's Training Bible and building some model weekly schedules. All the while trying to keep in mind that the focus of his training Bible is younger athletes -- the information presented there needs to be tempered by what he says in Fast After 50.
Step one, fill in anchor workouts, things that happen at times that are hard to change.
That's strength training Monday and Friday at the gym with my trainer Dorian Cucia. Monday is upper body, Friday is lower body -- we switch based on what happens on Saturday. Wednesday evening is spin class at our house, Thursday is yoga, and Saturday afternoon is gamelan. Pattie and I have been playing gamelan every Saturday for forty years. What is not on the schedule yet but has a time constraint are pool swim workouts. The pool is only available (to me) weekday mornings.
Now to fit in the three workout intensities from Fast After 50. I am planning the start of my base period in 2020, which begins the week of Feb 3rd. I already have two of my second priority workouts for this period, strength training, on Monday and Friday. I'll put aerobic threshold (priority one) on Sunday and aerobic capacity (priority three) on Tuesday. Both of these are on the bike, thus the workout name begins with "C."
Friel highly recommends doing aerobic capacity intervals on the bike, on the turbo trainer, as this is less likely to cause injury than running, and the effect applies across all three activities. I follow the same advice for long runs except I do those on the road, moving most of the aerobic threshold work to the bike and doing just enough running to keep the legs strong. Lately those long bike rides have been on Sunday. For this same period the base long run was on Saturday morning, then in the build periods it moved to Tuesday morning.
Now all that is left is to fill in the remaining time slots. Here is what I have so far. I shaded these workouts green and for lack of a better label called them free.
Now let's tally up the workouts. This does not get down into detail, hard vs. easy, just occurrences
Swim - 2
Bike - 3
Run - 2
ST - 2
Other - 1
Remember what I said at first? The goal is to do each activity three times per week. Too much stuff to fit into my suitcase.
Stay tuned.
