Your Best Season Ever Part 1: the overall structure and plan.

Many athletes seem to get stuck in the next-race mentality.

They are constantly building towards the next big event without stopping to decide if that’s the right approach.

I think there is a better way.

One that allows you to have your best race performance and builds towards your best season ever.

Underestimating what’s possible

As humans, we underestimate what we can do over a longer timeline and underestimate what we can do in a shorter timeline.

Example: We know that in 6 weeks we can build towards a sprint distance triathlon. But what’s possible with 2-3 years of focus on that distance.

Most Olympic training cycles build athletes up to 1 key race over a 3-4 year period. This allows the time needed to properly develop and hope that they are ready for the Olympic races. We can take a similar approach in our own training.

Olympic speedskater Nills Vanderpool outlined his training plan into big blocks of time:

This gave him the time and focus to go on to win multiple medals and set world records.

When we spend too much time focusing on the short-term races we rush training, ignore injuries, and try to get it done at all costs.

This is not an enjoyable way to train for endurance.

Breaking out of the next-race mentality

There is a very typical cycle I see with athletes who are caught in the next-race mentality.

• Sign up for a race in 8 months
• Trains hard for 2 months
• Injured and missed a month
• Trains hard for remaining 3 months
• Finishes the race but is disappointed with the result.

This athlete overestimated what they could get done in 8 months.

Because they were jamming too much into their training, the body didn’t have time to adapt to training resulting in the injury.

Even if the athlete did not get injured they still may have not reached their performance goals because they were too short-sighted.

We avoid this cycle by thinking in bigger chunks of time.

With a different focus of your training in each block.

Planning your Best Season Ever

The solution to this is breaking out of the next-race mentality and planning your best season ever.

Over the next few letters, I’m going to break down each step in the process in its own letter. Giving you workout examples and training weeks that you can use in your training.

Here’s a rundown of the process:

Step 1: Get healthy

This should be the first step before you take on a big race.

Here are some of the things I look for:

1. consistent weekly volume
2. no niggles or injuries
3. stable readiness metrics
4. low life stress overall

As a coach this tells me you’re ready for more.

If you can’t check off each of these then you know what you need to do.

Take care of any injuries. Build out an ideal training week. Start preparing.

Keep it simple here and just get moving.

Find the enjoyment from training again.

​Read on for some ideas for on establishing your sustainable and healthy routine.

Timeline: 1-2 years

Step 2: Build some volume and a base

Once you’re healthy and training regularly we can start to build the base.

Base building has 3 focuses:

1. Increase overall volume to prepare for the race
2. Add in speed work
3. Dial in technical aspects where needed
4. Add strength work

Your basic week will be mostly easy training but will sprinkle in speed and strength work.

The goal here is to maintain the healthy habits you built in step 1, while still adding more training.

Timeline: 1-2 years.

Step 3: Target your goal race pace

The next block of your training you can start to get more specific on your race pace work.

We might do threshold and/or tempo intervals, slowly zeroing in on how you’re going to perform come race day. These types of intervals will show us how you handle the pace of racing.

For Ironman and 70.3 training, we will also start to dial in your long days. To make sure you’re ready for race day.

Your ideal week here will have a variety of long sessions, easy sessions, and speed work. But the focus will be on quality efforts across the week.

Timeline: 8-16 weeks

Step 4: Final race prep

The final block is all about turning the fitness you have built into race-specific performance.

In this short block, the focus will be nailing key sessions to test fuelling, pacing and readiness for race day.

This might be long days, or short key sessions depending on the race distance you’re taking on.

Timeline: 4-12 weeks

That’s all for today.

In the next letter, we will talk about building your base and balancing your aerobic volume with speed and strength work.

Chandler