Official Pie-Season Winter Training Kickoff Day

I've toiled over the schedules and have come up with a plan for the most of winter: an olympic distance plan that I'll probably modify here and there as I go. And today (drumroll)................... is the first day of it. [cheering!]


A snapshot of the schedule:

Sundays - off
Mondays - base swim in the a.m. / run in the p.m.
Tuesdays - biking...which I'll do mostly through an a.m. spinning class / strength
Wednesdays - interval swim in the a.m. / run in the p.m.
Thursdays - biking...1 to 2 hours
Fridays - swim (base or intervals) in the a.m. / run in the p.m.
Saturdays - biking...which I'll do either in an a.m. spinning class or on my bike / strength

So that's it in a nutshell.
I'll see how it goes every week. It seems pretty balanced.


This morning I swam 1200 yards. Warmed up 200, did 6x25 pull drills, 4x100 main set, 8 x 25 kicks, 6x25 pulls with high elbows, and cooled down 5 x 50. Wait. That's 1350 yards. I can never count correctly when I'm in the pool! Oops.

Lucky for me, this day is supposed to be nice and sunny and warm, so when I run this afternoon, it should be nice. It's been getting colder, and I'm just not acclimated to the dark and chilliness yet. I'll get there though.

This Week

Planning and planning and making schedules and changing the schedules...

I've decided to try an Olympic distance schedule to see how I handle that amount o' stuff. But for a few more weeks, I'm just going to take it easy, doing all the workouts, but no serious pushing or strict direction to follow.

So, next week is going to look like this:

Monday: swim 1500 yards / run 2.5 miles
Tuesday: cycling class / strength: upper body
Wednesday: cycling class / quick swim 800 yards
Thursday: run 3 miles / strength: upper body
Friday: swim 1500 yards / run easy
Saturday: cycling long ride (tentative - because it's fall and I don't want to ride in cold rain)

Strength Training

I have never done much strength training, at least never consistently or properly. In my ongoing triathlon knowledge research, I've been reading a lot about what different athletes do in the off-season (aka Season of Pie, see previous post) as well as regular season. I have a ton of room for improvement as far as my strength goes (in other words, I'm pretty damn weak). I have free weights, but have been wanting to try out the Machines. Machines!! So yesterday after spinning class, I went wandering into the weights area of the community center.

It was intimidating, but I know it will get better once I'm confident with what I'm doing.

What I did:
• Curls
• Seated row
• Tricep extension
• Rotary torso (rotisserie chicken?)
• Lateral arm raise
• Shoulder press (really hard...which might explain why I am swimming slowly)
• Abdominal something or other (which I'm pretty sure I did wrong)
• Bench press thingy (awesome- felt very good for swimming muscles)

Then I did some core work:
• Leg swirl thingys (I should come up with better names)
• Reverse crunches
• Crunches
• Plank (I hate planks.)

Then I high-fived myself. Not really.