Well, we are twelve weeks into 2006. Yes, thirteen weeks makes a real quarter, but my brain is pretty mushy today, so I don't have anything philosophical or stimulating to write. Training has gone pretty well, no complaints, no injuries. This past weekend was the first to feature back to back 3 hour rides, wrapping up the biggest week (duration-wise) this year. I will defer boring you with full training stats until week 13 is over, even though this week is planned as a "rest" week, and thus will not affect the overall totals too much.
Having had only two weeks this year with training durations over 10 hours, why would I even need a rest week? Good question, and one for which I have a good answer. Anyone who acts as their own coach needs consider this: What is my capacity to train? Even if you hire a coach, this question still needs to be answered. Think about capacity. How do we measure it? The easy way would be to take the hours in the week, subtract the time needed for essential activities, and come up with some number of hours available for training. In this case, the easy way is not a very good way. A better approach would be to steal a lesson from Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) and use something called the bottleneck principle. If you've never heard of this, search google for theory of constraintsor take two hours and read The Goal.
Consider all the limiters to effective training besides time. Physical limiters, such as injuries, whether merely potential, or already realized, present the firmest of limiters to effective training. Keyword here is effective. Sure, you can push yourself to and past the point of injury, but what does that accomplish? Happiness can be another limiter. Reaching an athletic goal probably doesn't mean too much if in the process you bring misery to yourself and everyone around you. Conflicting goals, such as career or education goals need to be considered as well. Training primarily consists of adaptive athletic stress placed upon your body, but this amounts to only a portion of the total stress your beleagured being must endure, so how much you can bear without compromising your ultimate goal of being a happy, smiling human being must be taken into consideration when building your training plan.
Lucky for me, I have been doing this long enough to have a pretty good idea of where my functional limits are, and thus I set my athletic goals accordingly. Reading triathlete blogs such as AJV's, with stories of 19 hour weeks while working a full-time job, I marvel at how much people are willing to go through in the pursuit of sporting accomplishment. This guy (whom I don't know) is in his late twenties, which puts him pretty much in his prime, so he can probably handle it. When I was that age, my focus was also on doing as much as possible to succeed in the nobody gives a shit about this sport except the participants world of USCF regional racing. My job at the time wasn't too demanding, and 13-15 hour weeks on the bike were fairly common. Nineteen hours though, not me, not unless I was on vacation, and even then it only happened a handful of times.
There are a few guys in their mid forties who compete with us now that put in these kinds of grueling training hours. Some of them do quite well in races, but I wonder if they might not do even better if they stopped pretending to be Cat 1's going pro, and instead tailored their schedules to more closely fit the specific demands of Master's racing. Or maybe I am just jealous. Anyhow, detailing how I have been meeting my modest goals and on track to keep doing so will have to wait for another day. Maybe I am aiming low. Who knows? As I said at the top, my brain is a bit mushy today.
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