Pic Spocket

In the previous months, I passed a lot of time reading books and online content about triathlon training for my next season. It’s amazing the amount of information available. Turns out that too much information is not better than a lack of information. You easily get overwhelmed and confused between the different philosophies.

While preparing for my first big race in May 2010 would not be too complicated (I could just follow a published training plan), dealing with business travels and missed workout can easily transform in a headache. Preparing for the last big race of the season (Muskoka in September) while racing smaller races in the summer is also much more complex.

I quickly noticed that I was spending way too much energy on juggling with these topics. Therefore I decided to hire a personal coach. James Loaring at LPC has a lot of experience coaching age group athletes like myself. The reasons for working with a coach are:

• Relieve me from the stress of figuring out how to train and deal with missed workouts. I can then focus of training and other important things of life like passing time with my family.
• benefit from the extensive experience of a knowledgeable coach.
• Get the best return out of the limited training time I have available to invest. That means having a clear purpose for each training session and avoid ‘junk miles’.
• Perform better than I would have by just following a one-size-fit-all training program or by coaching myself (which could easily result in over training at the rate I was going).

I have now been training with Coach James for a couple of weeks and I can say that my training sessions could not be more different than what I was doing before. Everything is much more structured and I am training in several zones. I use to do all my training in tempo/race pace. Hopefully this will all pay off on race day!

 To give you an idea of how structured the training can be, see the article below that James posted on his blog, based on the bike split of the last ‘Loaring Training Days’. I had my Computrainer recording my workout and he used my data to support the discussion. Apparently, I was an good example of ‘proper pacing’. Clicking on the graph below will open my workout on Training Peaks.

>>Techy Tuesday: Dissecting a Indoor Bike Workout

That’s it for the sport bit! Come back soon for more news…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Sport and Races, Our news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.