This week was a pretty good week for training, in that I achieved two milestones, all before even starting my formal training plan. I have to admit that I’ve been doing “training” for the last couple of months, where the rest of the tri-community are all doing cross training. I was doing cross training last fall until it started to take a toll on my legs (interior shin splints), and then switched over to biking, followed by swimming, and then decided, why not try running a triathlon. 

Anyway, about those two milestones I archived this week. First, I averaged over 230 watts (232 watts) for the first time on my two hour endurance ride. All of my winter training is done on a Keiser M3 stationary bike wearing my normal biking shoes. The workout consists of 120 minutes of tempo work, divided up between a base gear (~90 RPM to hit target wattage) for 40 minutes, 20 minutes of a higher gear, then 60 minutes of the base gear. The gearing really won’t mean much to anyone else, but I did 13, 16, and then 14. I was doing 13, 15, 13 for a 8 weeks, but switched up to 13,16,13 a couple of weeks ago, and this week was the first time I was able to push gear 14 for the full second half of the workout.

The second milestone, was a 1500m time trial in a pool, in which I broke the 30 minute mark, setting a new personal best at 29:26. When I first started swimming back in November I think, I was able to swim 1500m in around 38 minutes, so in about three months I’ve shaved off over 8 minutes. Now if only it would be as “easy” to shave another 8 minutes off. I think the biggest impact on my swimming has been improving my technique, although I do feel my swim endurance getting better, and I feel less out of breath.

I am really looking forward to starting my actual 16 week training plan next week, in preparation for the Capital View triathlon. I still have to work out the details of the plan, and am trying to decide between a couple of different “levels” as defined in the book I have. Some of the starting distances for the swim, and bike duration seem awfully low, but instead of stepping up a level, I could just try to increase the intensity. Most of the reading I have done indicates that higher intensity workouts pay greater dividends then lower intensity but longer workouts.

Given my 1500m time of 29:26, I figure I could have increased my pace for a 20 minute test by 10%, so my 100m pace would be 1:45. I will use this number to figure out my different training zones for swimming, and based on some training sets I’ve done in the past, this will be a very good pace for me to shoot for. At this point, I’m hoping to break the 25 minute mark in the pool by June, which should hopefully equate to a 30 minute open water swim, although I have nothing to base this on.

You can view my online training log at Buckeye Outdoors (yeah, I think it’s a weird name for a training log site as well).