A look back at the training by Month, and Key Weekend Workouts

Seeing as I took the week off after IM to recover, I'm now feeling back to 100% almost despite a few aches and pains, I now have a load of free time on my hands. So I've been cleaning bikes, and generally doing odd jobs and stuff at home amongst eating to my hearts content :)

I decided to take the time to have a look back at the data I collected so far this year in training. In the hope I might be able to identify some areas to improve and focus on for next time.

Firstly we've got my total volumes below:

So you can see attempting to follow my plan, my cycling volume increased nice and linearly upwards towards the goal. (bearing in mind its organised by month, so some of the missed workouts aren't seen in the detail, with the exception of April appearing to be a fairly poor month. So cycling volume looks good with a nice progression.

Run training appears a little less successful, with volume staying level, even decreasing across the time period. This is despite my long runs increasing in distance, so it appears my smaller run workouts fell by the wayside during training and I was either concentrating on long runs or not at all. (I'll go into more granular detail below).

Swim volume, appears to have followed run in its decrease. There's no real excuse for this other than laziness. I swam too much prior to the plan, and I think the plan weights far too much in favour of swimming with in excess of 3 hours a week for most of the plan. For me, I appear to require little training to maintain my speed (I could comfortable swim IM distance early in the season, and didn't really appear to build speed throughout). Therefore I got bored with swimming early in the season and just maintained. If I enter an IM again I will start swimming less, and then ramp it up later in the plan to keep it fresh.

Cycling in detail:  

Looking at the above graphs we can see further detail in my workouts throughout the 30 week plan. (Bear in mind these are only Saturday long rides, not total volume). So there was a nice progression up to four good century rides prior to the main event. There were still quite a few weeks missed, but overall it doesn't appear to have had a major effect. I am hoping to maintain a better level of cycling throughout the winter, so I can introduce greater mileage earlier on in the season next year. You'll note I began this year with some pretty small rides in the region of 20 miles.

However, if we then look at pace of rides, you would hope this might stay level across the season, or even increase with the rides, however in actual fact my pace has decreased with the lengthening rides. From 19mph averages down to under 18mph for my longer rides. With the exception of the Outlaw half on week 22 which was a 2:45 bike leg at 20.7mph average speed. A cracking ride if I say so myself, but probably too hard to be able to run well off of, which was the result with a 2:12 half marathon!

Lessons to take forward, do less junk miles in the week. Speed or threshold sessions with hill climbs, and then long rides at the weekend. I spent a lot of the early season just riding Z2 in the week, which I now think was a little pointless to a degree. Sure miles are miles in the saddle, but I think they could have been more productive.

Running in detail:

And I wonder why I sucked at running during IMUK and my races earlier in the season! The volume there is pretty appalling in reality. A lot of missed sessions towards the end of the program, with my longest sessions being three half marathons this year. Looking at my average pace across the program that also increaed with distance to average over 9 min/miles on my longer runs. And never really improved from the beginning of the year at 8:30 min/miles. 

Similar thoughts from cycling training here too. I'll be going for less volume, but more targeted sessions. I'm currently thinking along the lines of a speed session, an easy session, and a long session with some hill and technique work included too. I think I spent too much time just going through the motions and racking up distance (albeit small) rather than understanding what I needed to get out of each session. 

So definetly some things to focus on, and ways I think I can improve. I'll also hopefully be training with power on the bike soon, which should help reduce junk miles and enable me to tailor training specifically. 

I set out with the aim of specifically targetting my running this year, but it appears to have failed, so this is something I really want to work on this winter in preparation for next year.