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The Season Is Almost Over…Now What!
How to
approach triathlon training once the season is finsihed.
by
Michael Pate of
www.whenbigboystri.com
Tri season is rapidly coming
to a close and I find myself pondering what to do in the off-season. Will I
spend countless hours on the trainer and in the weight room? Will I bundle
up and ride and run in the cold months? Will I get complacent about the
past season and back way off training? These all could happen, but I think
that if you develop a strategy for the off-season, you can go into the next
season stronger than you ended the past season.
Take these steps to develop
off-season training plan:
1.
Evaluate your year. What
did you like about it, what didn’t you like about it?
2.
Identify your strengths
and weaknesses. Determine what makes you weak or strong in these areas.
3.
Look at each race
individually and determine if a certain course gave you more trouble than
another and what made that course different.
4.
Set goals for the next
year based on improving your weaknesses and maintaining your strengths. Be
realistic about your goals and try to set goals that you have a chance of
reaching or at least coming very close.
5.
Set aside workouts to
focus on technique for swim, bike and run. Many times in the off-season, we
think about just trying to maintain what we have achieved during the year
and basically just go through the motions. This year focus on technique in
each event. Improving your technique could save you more time than training
hard.
6.
Start planning your race
calendar for next season and decide which races will be your big races. Sit
down and decide which races you will race and make some of them your
priority.
7.
Identify your motivation
and objective for the following season. Make sure you know why you are
training and making sacrifices. I have talked to several people over the
last year who are training and racing, but they are miserable. I think
sometimes they have lost touch with what lights their fire and have become
focused on being able to check off the day’s workout as being complete.
8.
Commit to being
consistent. Once you know what you want to do for the off-season, focus on
staying consistent with your routines of working out. You have developed
habits of working out and you can just as quickly develop habits of not
working out.
9.
Make sure that you are
still having fun in the sport. There is nothing more disappointing for me
than seeing someone who is out on the race course and not living up every
minute of the experience. Don’t get me wrong. I love to set a new PR, but
on the other hand, it is just as important for me to savor each minute of
the race.
10.
Continue to believe in
yourself. You may have had some disappointments for the race year, but you
still have to believe in yourself. Try to remember the first day that you
decided you were going to train for a tri. You have made improvements and
attained goals that seemed unattainable at the time, but now they are just
accomplishments that you might take for granted.
By using the above steps, I
truly believe you can put yourself in a position to have a great tri season
next year. Sometimes we forget where we were going on this journey, but
with a little attention to what we have learned over the last season we can
learn a lot about ourselves.
Still Tri’n
Michael
The price of
success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination
that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the
task at hand. - Vince Lombardi
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