We are almost ready to start putting training plans together. Over the last few chapters we’ve discussed:
One of the last pieces of the puzzle to comprehend is how we combine a principled approach with a personalized flair.
When designing your training plan, you need to understand your personal limiters. Part of this is identifying your strengths and weaknesses as an athlete. But more than that, it’s identifying your low hanging fruit.
When most people think of their weaknesses they get discouraged. There’s good reason for this; it’s frustrating to work at something and not see much improvement!
This isn’t what we are talking about here. Instead, we want to compare the demands of the race with the areas we can improve the most! There’s no exact formula or recipe for us to follow to execute a great race because our physiologies are always in flux. Plus, each race demand, be it:
aerobic capacity
muscular endurance
neuromuscular fatigue
etc.
is unique to each athlete and each event.
Every session we do is a trade off. Working on one thing essentially means we aren’t working on something else. Therefore, we want to optimize the time spent training by going after the low hanging fruit!
The good news is that for a vast majority of athletes, their aerobic endurance is the main limiter and that should be the focus of many many sessions. But it certainly isn't the whole story of Ironman and Marathon training, so the rest will be personalized to you!
Due to the nature of this, without knowing your race and training history I can’t provide a purposeful training plan in one simple chapter. Instead, we can use this mindset as the lens to building your training blueprint.
Let’s think about the performance puzzle as an actual puzzle.
The picture on the box is your vision, likely with your goal finish at your A race front and center! Well, the stacking the pieces together in a way that makes sense is like putting the training plan together. Going for our low hanging fruit is like identifying the corner and edge pieces! It can be really difficult to know where to start, but when we pick the things that are clearly going to make a difference in our progression it becomes a lot simpler.
Keep in mind: our puzzles all look different and we’re at different stages in putting it together! Your “corner pieces” in training of where you can make huge strides might be the final touches on someone else's program!
Take some time to identify where you might stand to gain the most.
My 2023 Training + Racing Plan
I’ll use myself as an example on how to go after your low hanging fruit below. But before we get to that, here’s a very short video explaining my 2023 Goals and the mindset behind them.
In order to reach my Ironman goal of a sub 9:30 this fall, I have a LOT of work to do. But not all of that work is created equally. We have to look at my limiters: where are the “corner pieces?!”
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