Off-Season Update

I figured it would be good to update and keep a log of how the off-season is going for me.  If you follow my blog you know that I will not be racing again until February, which is 18 weeks away.  The off-season.

The last two weeks have been spent doing a lot of nothing.  Letting my body rest. Letting my brain rest.  I did mix in a little bit of running and weight lifting, but at a drastically reduced volume from what I was doing.  It has been great. I have been able to get some things done around the house that I have been meaning to do since we moved in July.

This next week I will be again riding the bike.  At first, I plan to do a low volume of riding, but also a moderate volume of running and weight lifting, so my volume will still be relatively high.  If you are a TrainingPeak/WKO+ nerd like me, I plan to keep my Cronic Training Load (CTL) around 50-60 TSS/day.  This will keep with a high level of aerobic fitness and put me in a good place to start a plan to increase my lactate threshold during the winter.

I dont keep track of running metrics that closely.  I don’t really enjoy trying to keep a certain pace or worry about mileage.  I usually wear a hear rate monitor and try to hold a tempo to threshold heart rate for about 45-50 minutes.  Compared the precise training load I keep on the bike, this is amateur.  But that’s the off-season!

For weight lifting, I focus mainly on legs and core work.  Legs workouts are usually squats, lunges, box jumps, box step ups, and squat jumps.  It is partially plyometric-esque movement and slow, more static exercises.  Core work is done on a separate day and consists of crunches, side crunches, planking, etc.  I have done a small amount of upper body maintenance exercise at low weight.  It’s embarrassing how many pushups I can (or can’t) do in a row. …

My main goal will be to measurably increase my lactate threshold over the winter.  This will improve my time trialing ability and keep me fresher for sprinting at the end of longer races.  Another goal is to keep training fun and different, and have time for family and friends.  There will be plenty of time for specificity in 2012.

This may change as I begin to work with a coach.  I’m 98% sure I have a coach lined up, but more on that later.  Hopefully I can find a balance of blogging about my training experiences without infringing on his intellectual property rights.