New Year’s Day

Joseph Vinciquerra | November 15th, 2006 | Posted in Training | 3 Comments »

Some might say it comes at the end of December, but any endurance athlete who knows a thing or two about putting together an annual training plan knows that it’s right about now that we celebrate New Year’s Day. With the 2006 season fully behind me, and with just about a month of relaxed, unstructured workouts, this past Monday marked the first day of my 2007 season.

Welcome aboard.

To go through the details of my plan would take quite a bit of time (and coffee) – and of course I’d be typing with the fear that I’d lose half my blog audience through boredom. But rest assured, I’ll be detailing various elements of it over the off-season… Especially during those cold, bleak, training weeks where there’s little else to talk about. I can tell you this, however: there will be plenty of base building, with little, itty, bits of intensity very carefully placed throughout my weeks. I’ve opted (apprehensively, at first) to move away from Friel’s extremely structured Base to Build progression, and instead have adopted an approach that will shift the focus a bit more on maintaining and building upon what I’ve already developed over the past several years as I’ve increased my race focus from short-course to long-course. Make no mistake, the volume-to-intensity ratios and periodization are still strikingly Friel-like, but the 2006–07 off-season is more like an extension of my 2006 race season, minus the high intensity elements common throughout the in-season.

This past year was a huge success – I can’t emphasize that enough. As part of my annual routine, I sit down at my computer, with an enormous cappuccino and plan out my training for the year to come… And that training plan generally starts with a reflection of the prior year’s goals, and the formulation of the coming year’s goals. Last year, I hit 4 out 5 season goals, and 4 out of 5 training objectives. Let me give you the details: My 2006 training objectives were largely focused on increasing my run performance – mostly through early season speedwork and in-season intensity. On top of that, I switched over to training on the bike using power-monitoring (as opposed to heart-rate monitoring) and had goals associated with that. The one training objective I missed was increasing my swim capacity to sub-1:30/100m’s on a 1000m TT. This, therefore, has become one of my 2007 primary training objectives.

As for my 2006 season goals, I aimed for a top 25% overall finish in either of the Half-Ironman races I competed in. In both cases, I bested 80% of the field for top 20% overall on the long-course. This included the pros. I also had a goal to be in the top 10 overall finishers in any of the short-course races I competed in. This goal was fully realized when I broke into the top-10 overall for the first time in my multi-sport career at the Saratoga Duathlon. At the Timberman Triathlon, I met my goal of going sub-1:45 on the half-marathon, and at the MHR Marathon, I met my goal of going sub-3:20 on the pure-marathon course. I missed qualifying for Boston by just about 3 minutes, but this was not one of my goals for this season. Is it in 2007? You can bet the farm on it. The fifth and final season goal I had for 2006 was to take an overall age-group win on the short-course. I missed this one, twice, pulling in second place finishes at both the Shamrock Duathlon and the Saratoga Duathlon.

Halfway along the bike course of the Tupper Lake half-iron this past summer, I remember thinking to myself “you’re really going to do it” meaning that I was, in fact, going to finish strong that day – my first day on the long-course. I knew then – even before the completion of the bike course or even the start of the half-marathon – that I’d be able to… That I would do Ironman in 2007. I would train with motivation and tenacity that would humble my previous seasons. And after the completion of the season, and a little time off, that training has started. New Year’s Day.

Thanks for reading.