Over the Christmas period I have noticed two types of triathlete appear. Some use every spare minute including Christmas Day and New Year’s Day to maximise their training…and the others use these great opportunities as an excuse to do nothing!
Over the festive period get out and try some of these sessions, it will turn up the metabolism and allow you to indulge yourself in more of those naughty but tasty Christmas foods…anyway this is what Carl will be wading through this the festive season.
Hill Reps
You need a hill that takes about 3 minutes to run up, on gradient of 6-10%. You should just be able to jog back in 3 minutes. If you cannot get back to the start in time, you have run up the hill too fast, or the hill is not steep enough.
Start at 3 repetitions and add on one per week up to 6 reps then maintain until end of period.
Also before starting include some hopping. 4 sets of 5 hops left leg and 5 hops right leg twice through. Concentrate on contact with the ground and your drive phase…remember, land- lever- lift.
To do the hopping correctly, land on the midfoot. It is actually impossible to land on the heal when hopping uphill. I would recommend never hopping on flat ground as it puts too much stress on your knees, always uphill hopping. Next you must Lever, ensure you get your centre of gravity over the front of the shoe and then drive forward and lift off the ground again (read more about one legged hill running here).
Easy Run with Strides
This is a recovery run, but instead of wasting time I have added in some strides to help develop leg cadence. So long as the sprints are downhill or on the flat, always with the wind, and there is a long recovery period between each 75m wind assisted stride, you should not build up lactic acid. This is because the muscles will use stored ATP energy. My athletes always feel much fresher after this session than if they took the day off completely.
Track Session
This is well documented in a previous blog. Even IM athletes should spend one period of their base training on the track, to ensure they do not develop the IM shuffle! However I will allow them to run the intervals slightly slower than my Olympic distance athletes, as the IM guys are just putting in the ground work in for some much longer intervals later on.
Time Trial or Race
It is good to do a steady run at your aerobic threshold to help develop your efficiency, it is also good to keep a hand in at some sort of racing so that it is not such a big shock to the system when IM comes around, due to the nature of the beast, you can only really do one or two IM races a year, so it is important do a race of some type from time to time.
On the Bike
As it is the middle of winter, I keep cycling down to a minimum. It can be sole destroying having to do long slow rides on cold, damp and windy winter days.
The focus of cycling in this base period, is on building up power, via Low Cadence training high resistance cycling. It is ok to do this indoors. This training can be as simple as 6 x 5 minutes pushing a big gear at about 65-75 cadence. Hold the biggest gear you can, while maintaining cadence. As you get stronger gradually push a bigger gear rather than increasing cadence. I tend to take about 3 mins easy spinning between reps.
The other key session, is in contrast, and could actually be classified as an easy ride. I vary the sessions but the objective is to do easy intervals with little resistance to allow me to keep my cadence between 90 and 120. This real helps you concentrate on cycling efficiency, again I would do it indoors this time of year !
In the Pool
As Carl has a strong swimming background, the aim is to stop him making the fundamental error of concentring on his stronger discipline. One drill session and one interval session will get him through this phase. If he had been a strong runner I would have dropped that down to 2 run sessions a week and would have focussed on the swim.
I have one final point to add for this time;
Over the past three blogs, I have shown how to build up a programme from race day and work backwards in time. I have also shown how to take it from the macro scale down to the micro scale. It is important to know where and why everything fits into the system.
However it is important to stress that this is the frame work, and from it we will inevitably deviate, when the real world comes into play…Injuries and sickness may happen. Work and family pressure may causes sessions to be cancelled or altered…but the key thing is that Carl can now see where he is heading and will soon be able to get back on track if he misses some sessions.
It should be fun reading his blog to see how he copes with is schedule and whether or not he breaks 11 hours at Ironman Lanzarote!