Scheduling a training plan with key sessions. Leaving enough time for social and work life to balance it out and make it feasible to prepare for a long distance triathlon. I will call this the Road to Ironman New Zealand.
As mentioned in my previous blog post my next big triathlon event will be Ironman New Zealand in March 2020. It seems like to be far away, but in reality? Its not! From September 2019 to March 2020 it is just 6 months of time. Not an awful amount of time for preparations when you think about it.
Balancing it out
But there is not just this Ironman preparation I have to spend for the next half year. There always has to be enough time for social life. Locking myself away training day and night will not make my beloved girlfriend, friends and family very happy. Although everybody is highly supportive in this endeavor.
Then there is also work. You remember – the thing that earns you money and makes all of this possible in the first place? I am working as a Software Engineer highly involved into complex solution strategies. Things and workload can vary pretty much from week to week.
As you can see, I cannot just focus on doing an Ironman. This is something every amateur knows or learns when doing their first long distance race. Finding the right balance and juggling all these factors will be crucial for success.
Planning and Key Sessions for Ironman New Zealand
So that are a lot of factors to consider when planning my training up to March 2020. My strategy will be to roughly plan out the week with a repeating schedule of training:
- Monday: Swim
- Tuesday: Run
- Wednesday: Run
- Thursday: EMS/Fitness
- Friday: Bike,
- Saturday: Swim + Run
- Sunday: Bike
Some of my more triathlon experienced readers might miss a so called Rest day. Rest day is a day where you will not do any exercise to give your body a full recovery. I plan to not have such a full recovery day, instead some of the sessions will be of relatively low intensity. So my approach will be to have an active recovery instead of a full recovery.
As mentioned earlier I still need flexibility in my training, due to social and work responsibilities. My weekly schedule will therefor be more like a guidance and not a strict obligation to me. The motto will be Quality over Quantity. It is not important to do a workout every day – but there are certain Key sessions to complete weekly. These sessions for me are Interval Run, Interval Bike and Long Run, Long Bike. All of these workouts will vary in intensity and duration over the course of my training until race day. Every other workout is encouraged but not a must.
Session of the week as Ironman preparation
This week I was doing an „Interval Run“ after a long time. It is one of my mentioned Key sessions I was avoiding for the last weeks due to comfort. Now I felt like it was time again to kick up some dust and improve my tempo durability again. It was not just a step forward to empower the concept of key sessions as a must, but felt also very good to blow off some steam after a pretty hectic week at work so far.
This session focus is to improve your tempo and can pretty intense. Especially when tempo and duration of the intervals increase, which they will the closer Ironman New Zealand race day comes. It is key to be fresh when tackling this kind of session and give your body enough opportunity to recover for following sessions.
Do you have any further suggestions how to approach my training on the Road to Ironman New Zealand? Feel free to leave a comment below! See you around for my next blog post!
Your training sounds interesting
Thank you, I will keep more insights coming over time.