If you have been around the sport of triathlon very long you have probably heard this phrase many times: "Listen to your body." It's good advice, especially since our sport attracts high achievers who would rather push through a fog of fatigue than cut a workout short. Training while seriously fatigued can lead to repetitive stress injury and burn out.
I happen to like a companion expression, which is "A little something every day." The reason I like this phrase is that I know too many athletes, myself included, who overcompensate when they feel fatigued. It’s as if we listen to our bodies with a stethoscope.
This is not to say we should go all in every day. Far from it. The way I design a training plan for senior athletes is to place three "must do" hard activities in a week. Two of those are high intensity, the other long and slow. Everything else is easy peasy.
Easy does not mean optional. It means to keep the intensity and duration low. Of course those are relative terms. I mean low for you. At the end of the workout you should feel all warmed up and ready for more. If you feel more fatigued than you did at the start, you went too hard.
Senior runners may find it difficult to run slow enough. In that case, a brisk walk is all you need. In triathlon, especially, there is no such thing as a recovery run.
The one exception to the easy peasey rule is strength training. Early in the season senior athletes should schedule two or three hard strength training workouts per week. As the season progresses that should be cut to two, with shorter duration, then one, and finally none during the taper for an “A” race. I am not going to go into detail here about what to do, only to say that reps should be fewer than normal gym sessions, with high loads. The goal is not so much increased muscle mass as improvements in hormone levels and bone density.
