LONG WORKOUTS AND STRATEGY

While I have been actively building my workout base all year, I now am in crunch time where I know I have to step it up some. I've been following a fairly relaxed schedule but was running into a roadblock when trying to figure out how to get more quality long bike workouts in on weekends, in addition to long run workouts. Sometimes that worked, sometimes not. Whenever I have a bad long bike workout, I always worry about making cutoff times in long events.

One thing I love about long swim workouts is that it helps me sort through those problem areas, tweaking the schedule here, tweaking the schedule there, but until today not coming up with any do-able plan. My half IM training program got to be way too tedious, with long swim workouts and run workouts on the same day. For some reason, I cannot stand doing long swim or run workouts after work. I don't mind doing bike workouts, but that may be more from the obvious reason that I can't do them in the morning on work days all that often due to darkness and time. By the time the training program was almost over, I was so sick of the pool I could hardly stand it.

Then I made a change that got me motivated again. So I have been doing swim workouts M, W, & F, run and bike workouts T & Th., long runs Sat., long bikes Sun. But still something has been lacking. Today in the pool I started really working on that dilemma, and I came up with a new plan that I hope works. I think it will help improve my biking and my bike to run transition as well.

My new plan will still be to swim M, W, & F, with long swims on Wednesday. Then my long run will be on Tuesday morning. That means I'll be getting to work late, but with all my extra hours that will not affect my total weekly hours at all. It will just mean planning ahead with people at work to let them know I will be in late on Tuesdays. Thursdays will continue with a morning run, finishing up with my hill workouts and eventually moving on to some speedwork, with a bike ride Thursday nights, again hills and speed. Saturday will be a mid distance bike ride with a run after, building on the distance there, and a long ride on Sunday. I know it sounds like I'm working out all the time, and in reality I do something every day, but I am used to getting up early anyway, and I prefer morning workouts so that I am not doing harder workouts back to back (night to morning), so even though I am doing something every day, two morning swims are easy workouts, and I don't consider them wearing me out.

I don't have much time to get this thing right, so here goes, hopefully off to a good start toward a great finish!